Каарон Уоррен - The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2018 Edition

“So what happened after the gigs were over?”

King shrugged. “We stopped hearing from him. By the end of the tour, he wasn’t really talking to any of us anyway. We took our cut of the door and went our separate ways.”

“And, what, that’s it?” I said. “You never heard from him again?”

King had finished his beer. I ordered him another. He said, “People come and go in this game, mate. Look, I heard from Jez, our drummer that Hugo had sold all of his gear. Couldn’t afford the rent and got kicked out on his arse. He was sleeping rough for a while. Still got his guitars and some recording gear in storage. Heard he was trying to write some new material but the drugs were getting in the way. No cash flow so he was borrowing and not paying it back. Last I heard he was in a squat with Jez and a couple of girls. Still playing. Still not talking. Still trying to get from here to there. You know?”

“Do you have an address?” I asked. “For the squat.”

“What are you anyway,” he said, “the fuzz or something?”

I didn’t know at that point why I wanted to find Hugo Lawrence. But I’d caught a glimpse of that uncertain geography, and I could see how it could flood your life, for better or worse. King made a couple of calls, and then, somewhat reluctantly, gave me the address.

I don’t know what I expected to find. The squat was in a row of boarded up terraces, narrow little homes in a warren of backstreets. A shithole of an estate. Feral kids roaming in packs, dogs straining at leads like unexploded bombs, young men and women with permanently listless scowls on their faces.

I assumed it was where Hugo Lawrence had come to die or else to find a way out or in. To break on through to the other side . I clambered over a fence and found a smashed back window that I could crawl through.

The smell assaulted me as soon as I dropped through the window. The scent of honeysuckle and jasmine, phlox and tuberose. A dizzying and suffocating mass of flowers. But it was not just that. Nothing is ever just one thing. There was something broken and corrupted too. It was the kind of smell you wouldn’t assume you could identify, but there it was: not just shit and piss and the fug of heroin, but the putrefaction of bodies, the slow, ugly decay of flesh. I stumbled through the kitchen, taking a breath and holding it, my mind gone blank, narrowing to a point of light.

There were three of them in what remained of the room, long dead on the floor, their bodies beginning to liquefy into the carpet. The smell of spoiled eggs and shit. But that was not the most significant part of the room. It really wasn’t a room anymore. The floor was flooded with clover and cow parsley and tangled grass; there were bluebells growing between the corpses’ fingers, in the places where their bodies had decomposed the most. Claiming them for the earth. Gypsophilia flooded from between one of the women’s legs, across the room and up one of the remaining walls. It was scrawled with a set of numbers and mathematical symbols that I had neither the time nor the inclination to inspect. The geography of the house had been corrupted from within. It wasn’t evident from the outside. The transformation was beautiful, rich beyond words. The heavy, blossom-laden branches of a hawthorn tree. A sea of weeping willows hanging over grassy banks, meadows and copses at the limit of my vision, all seemingly illuminated from within. A drowsy hum to the earth; a heavy stillness that fizzed in the blood. A guitar had been abandoned on a granite outcrop and claimed by lichen. A stream sprang from the rocks, singing quietly and rolling gently around the body of a young man. His long hair was crawling with lice and beetles. The leaves of a Rowan tree, tremulous with dew. Heather and foxgloves, little collapsed stone walls. Everything was flooded with small details, expanded beyond all comprehension. What remained of the room simply resembled old ruins in an ecstatically rendered landscape.

Hugo Lawrence wasn’t among the bodies, so I went in pursuit of him. I fled through a field of poppies toward the promise of summer, or the remains of it. For a while I felt like part of something. I walked for an hour or more. My feet were soaked and my mind was tranquilized. There was immanence to the place. Something I could only call magic, because I had no other words for it.

What else can I tell you? I didn’t find Hugo’s Sunflower Junction. There was a place here for someone, but not for me. This was the ghost of someone else’s imaginings. I lay for a while in the gorse on the side of a valley, breathless and weeping. I don’t really know why. A vague sense of exile perhaps, or of the evanescence of things. I found another guitar on a rock, along with a small digital recorder. I waited for a while, but Hugo was long gone. I took the recorder and made my way back. I glanced behind me now and then, thinking I’d caught a glimpse of a sea of sunflowers somewhere, just beyond a rise, through the trees, across a river. But I was mistaken. It wasn’t mine to find.

A week after Emily died I packed a bag with just the essentials. Toiletries, a few changes of clothes, my wallet, cards, phone, laptop. I didn’t even take any pictures of her with me. There were some on the phone anyway. I paid the last of the rent, talked to the insurance people and solicitors, put the furniture and our belongings in storage. There was no one I needed to say goodbye to. No family and no more than a handful of friends whose lives had taken them away from me as we’d hit our forties. I stayed for the funeral, and then I left.

We’d married young. Emily was seventeen and I was twenty-two. Those relationships tend not to last, but ours did. A few bumps in the road but what we had was clearly too important to walk away from. So many things that seem important when you’re young fall away from you as you get older. And all that remains is love. The short list of things that you wouldn’t do for each other. I think so, anyway. Time has clouded my judgement.

Emily was three months pregnant when she was diagnosed with leukemia. The doctors told us that the baby would have to be aborted in order for Emily to begin chemotherapy. We made the decision for her to have the abortion after days of gentle and quietly dismayed discussion. But it made no difference. A complication occurred. Something to do with white blood cells; a doctor speaking to us in quiet, uninflected tones on a bright day in June. My memories of that time are scrambled, purposely left vague to stop me coming to harm. Emily spent three months in a hospital bed, gradually diminishing, day by day, getting further and further away from me, until she finally succumbed.

I remember the bed, stripped of its sheets afterwards. I remember it quite clearly. The awful absence of life.

I left the squat and made an anonymous call to the police from a heavily vandalized phone two streets away. When I got home, the house was almost unnaturally still. Usually I could hear Ingrid on the floor above me, laughing at some nonsense on the TV, or running a bath, or crying in her sleep. But she had been sectioned at a clinic ten miles away along the coast. I didn’t know when she’d return. After an hour of circling Hugo’s digital recorder which I’d left on the coffee table, I picked it up and took it downstairs to tell Colin what I’d found.

But Colin was dead. I found him on his threadbare sofa, his head slumped forward. The needle and the tourniquet had slid between the cushions. I checked for a pulse, hoping perhaps he was just wasted. But there was nothing. He was clutching the strip of photos of his sixteen-year-old self and a girl called Sally, the making and the ruination of his life.

I stood up and paced the room, a breathless emptiness clutching at me. Like the anticipation of just plunging off the edge of a precipice. Rage and sorrow, all at once. That all too familiar wound.