John Banville - Nightspawn

I gave him some money, and the address. The car roared away. A little rubber monkey bobbed up and down on a string in the rear window.

I was cold, I was exhausted. I walked down toward the Plaka. The water lorries were out, raising a delicious odour from the wet pavements strewn with rancid garbage. The dawn was not far off. The spotlights on the Acropolis were doused, and the Parthenon vanished aburptly, leaving a black hole in the sky. Birds were coming awake all over the city, their frantic music touching the darkness with inviolable beauty. I was never to see Erik again.

I stayed in bed for the rest of the day, not sleeping, not really, but sliding between sleep and waking with such nauseating ease that eventually I could not distinguish between the two. I felt as though I were aloft in a grey and terrifying sky, dropping and spinning, wheeling and plummeting, pierced by foul freezing winds. The beasts had a field day.

At last, toward evening, I crawled from between the sheets, a damp acrid odour coming up from my skin. I made coffee, and sat by the table, nibbling at a husk of bread, lost in an extravaganza of self pity. There was a noise outside in the corridor, and I turned to the door. A slip of paper appeared beneath it. That little white scrap advanced hesitantly, scratching and scraping, and I had the eerie feeling, watching it sniff at my floor, that I was glimpsing one small corner of an enormous terror which was pressing its swollen, white cold flesh against the door. By the time my wits had marshalled their forces, and I got that door open, the corridor was smugly empty. I shut out all that silence, and fearlessly picked up the note. It was from Erik. His handwriting, which I had never seen before, surprised me with its neatness and docility, its deference, almost, to the reader’s eye. The tall letters demurely bowed their heads, the others were fat and fulsome. It was written in violet ink. That German was full of little surprises (of which, by the way, this was not one, for it was not he who had written the note). I crumpled it up and threw it away into a corner of the room, put on a jacket, and left.

I pulled the front door as it was being pushed. The pusher and I did a polite little dance, and then I jumped back. It was Andreas. There was a wild light in his eye, and his hair, usually so smooth and gleaming, stood on end. I thought at first that he was drunk.

‘What do you want?’ I snapped.

He propped his hunch against the doorjamb, and smiled at me.

‘Have you seen Erik?’

His voice was peculiar, tense as a spring, as though he were stifling a laugh or a howl, perhaps both.

‘I was with him last night,’ I said.

Had something happened to him? Throat slit by Bill or Mick? Picked up by the police? I did not want to know. I made an effort to push past the cripple. He was surprisingly tenacious.

‘Have you seen him today?’ he asked, forcing me carelessly back into the hall with a twist of his shoulder.

‘Look,’ I cried. ‘What is this?’

He laughed, grinding his teeth at the same time. I started to make another effort to get past him, but gave it up.

‘I’ve had a note from him,’ I said. ‘He asked me to meet him tonight.’

‘Where?’

‘That’s for me to know, and you to find out.’

‘It doesn’t matter. You are going to give it to him?’

‘I don’t know. I suppose so. What’s going on? Is something moving?’

He gaped at me in disbelief.

‘You don’t know?’

‘No.’

‘You are a fool. Goodbye.’

He turned, and lurched away into the gathering dusk. I cried,

‘Listen, wait …’

But he was gone. I followed his shuffling figure for a while, but he was leading me away from my destination, and soon I gave up the chase.

I crossed the Plaka, through the little streets. Monasteraki was closing its bazaars and stalls. There was a sense of pleasant weariness in the air, after the day’s work, and flat voices, accounting, complaining, singing, were everywhere in the furry darkness. The oil lamps were extinguished in the stalls, one by one, two together, a little flurry of lights failing, like stars dying. I am assailed always by the beauty of that city, am led astray. Give me a moment.

Andreas called me a fool, and I would not dare to disagree with his judgement, but I must say here, in fairness to myself, even though I do not deserve it, that things were not so obvious as I have made them appear in these pages. The process of artistic selection sometimes eliminates the nuances which mislead. I have tried to retain a few of them, but they have a fishy smell. Anyway, I think that it should be … look, what am I excusing? What do I care? I am the boss around here, of course I am, and I shall do as I like, so put that in your column and criticize it.

The shop was locked and dark. I cupped my hands around my eyes and peered in through the window. There was nothing to be seen but the vague shapes of shelves and books, the counter, the step-ladder leaning drunkenly, and my stool, the worn bowl of the seat holding a pool of yellow light from the street lamp above me. I tried the door again. It insisted on being locked. I gave it a kick, and the little bell inside tinkled faintly.

I waited for an hour, standing by the window. Then I went to the café opposite, and sat over a coffee for another hour, watching the street. When I was ready to give up, Andreas arrived. I put a hand to my forehead, to cover my face, and watched him through the web of my fingers. It was as though my own movements had been filmed, and were now being reproduced on a black crystal screen. He tried the door, and, finding it locked, stepped back and surveyed the place, with his hands on his hips. He peered through the window, tried the door again, and, yes, gave it a kick. The film ended. He walked slowly away up the street, with many a backward glance, and disappeared into the darkness like an awkward black spider. I went home.

Aye, and found the door of my home standing ajar. Through that inch-wide opening came nothing but darkness. I stood and listened, and heard a silence. I put a fingertip to the knob. The door creaked, that band of darkness expanded, and then, all was as before. I waited. A lavatory flushed somewhere below, with a satisfied gulp. This was ridiculous. I pushed open the door and went into the room. The bulb in the hall sent a spearhead of light across the floor, illuminating the leg of a chair, a crumpled ball of paper, and a stain on the dirty linoleum. I closed the door behind me.

‘Erik?’ I said.

My voice shattered some vital component of the silence, and I was sorry that I had spoken. I stood and listened, convinced that there had been another sound, parallel to my own, as though the room had been waiting for me to give it a chance, like a man at a party seeking a propitiously noisy moment to let fall a fart. I took a couple of steps across the floor, and then, in a flash of blinding white light, something hard fell on the back of my head, behind my ear, and I was falling, down, down into total darkn— wait now, wait, I am getting carried away with all this thriller stuff. Backspace, a bit. I took a couple of steps across the floor, and halted.

‘Erik,’ I snapped, sounding as petulant as an old lady.

Nothing. There was no one there, no one, such foolishness, I heaved a sigh of relief, tramped across to the wall and began fumbling for the lightswitch. I found it, yes, but found also that a warm, soft, very live finger had reached it before me. Ow. I froze. There was not a sound. An hallucination, nothing more. I reached for the switch again, smiling at my foolishness, and —