John Banville - Nightspawn

I met Erik. He came stalking out of the darkness like some strange armorial beast, his lips drawn back from his teeth: a cemetery gate open in the moonlight. He was washed, and even shaved, and the deeper wrinkles had been shaken from his tubular suit. His huge boots banged on the cobbles. It took him a moment to remember me, to place me in the context of his awful morning. He halted uncertainly.

‘Hello Erik,’ I said.

He smiled, nodding ruefully, and jabbed a finger at me.

‘White, my friend, how are you?’

‘Fine.’

We set off down the alleyway. Erik clasped his hands behind his back, and pursed his lips. I suspect he was trying to think of something to say. Who knows what depths of groundless malice gave to my voice its careless inflexion when I said,

‘You heard about the murder, I suppose? It was our friend Black. I’m afraid you won’t be able to meet him now.’

Sea-sickness and drink had dulled the edge of his perception. It took him the space of two or three steps to realize the significance of what I had told him. He came to a standstill and looked at me like an inquisitive crow.

‘Black?’ he murmured.

I nodded.

‘Yes indeed. Hadn’t you heard?’

‘But they have not yet identified the body. How could you know?’

‘I was there.’

‘I see.’

I became bored with the game. He was too calm. Had he been better material, I would have kept him dancing for a good ten minutes more, shooting tiny fragments of tantalizing information at his toes like bullets. But Erik was a professional survivor, had seen more disasters than I could imagine, and he was too calm. Besides, he knew the rules of my game. I told him what I had seen, what I had done. I was proud of myself and my handling of the situation, I admit it, I was pleased as I could be. What did it matter if terror had for a moment made a gibbering imbecile of me? There was no need to mention that. Erik was silent for a long while, scratching his jaw, then he clicked his teeth, and said,

‘Fang.’

‘What do you mean, Fang?’

He stared at me as though he had forgotten, yet again, who I was.

‘Well?’ I cried.

He grinned. This would not do, by god, this was mutiny, now he was playing with me. He patted my arm.

‘Everything is fine,’ he said. ‘Fine. Come along, we must have a drink to mourn the dead.’

I turned on my heel and strode away from him. Soft laughter rattled the darkness at my back.

After a search, we found a taverna that was open in that penitential season, a gloomy place with some chairs, a table or two, and an oil lamp swinging under the blackened ceiling. We peered into the shadows, and something spoke.

‘What you want?’

From a corner a single eye regarded us malevolently.

‘Retsina,’ I said, in my very best Greek. ‘Retsina parakalo.’

The eye came forward, and the lamplight set beside it a dirty black patch, a head around it, a twisted trunk below with one sleeve of a jacket hanging empty. Another mutilated relic of forgotten wars.

‘What you want?’ the moist mouth barked again.

‘Wine, some wine for my friend and me. Retsina, yes?’

‘No retsina, no wine.’

‘Oh for the love of Jesus.’

Erik was already sitting at a table near the door, chewing his nails abstractedly and looking at the street. I joined him. After a time the cripple brought a carafe and a pair of greasy glasses. He banged them down on the table with a grunt, and shuffled back into his corner. I filled a measure of wine for Erik and myself. I said,

‘Andreas doesn’t trust me. He called me a coward.’

Erik softly sniggered.

‘Andreas trusts no one,’ he said.

‘Not even himself?’

‘Himself least of all.’

He shrugged, and frowned, and it came to me that Andreas was not the only cripple in that strange pair, for Erik also seemed to be wounded in some deep-lying fibre, though what that wound was, or what that fibre, I could not yet say. It took me a long time to realize that Erik … but no matter, no matter, everything in its place. He sat half turned away from me, his untidy profile cut against the last faint light in the doorway. I had a crimson glimpse of blood and screams.

‘Do you really think all this is necessary here in Greece now?’ I asked.

He did not look at me, but pursed his lips, and lifted his four fingers to let them fall one by one in rapid succession, a little tune on the scale of hopelessness. I clacked my teeth irritably, and his little grey eyes swivelled round and glanced at me quizzically.

‘Why do you do that?’ he asked, with real interest.

I cast about for the root of what had angered me, and could see it but dimly.

‘This whole revolution thing,’ I cried, waving my arms.

‘What about it?’

‘Ah, I don’t know. It’s not real.’

‘Then why are you —’

‘Because I’m bored.’

The answer surprised us both, and we fell silent. It was true, and I was sorry I had said it. Accidie was my greatest fear. I tried to retrieve something.

‘He was shot in the neck, there, it blew a hole that size. I mean, you didn’t see it. I don’t know. Deaths, murders … I just want to write a little book, that’s all.’

I took a drink and watched the darkness deepen in the street. Nightheat lay heavy about us. Suddenly Erik cackled. His laughter, if it could be called that, died as abruptly as it had begun. He took off his spectacles and folded them carefully on the table before him, then with a thumb and forefinger he massaged the bridge of his nose.

‘I was in Zurich once,’ he said. ‘For my nerves, you know? They put me into a little room with rubber walls, a rubber floor. There were six of us. We were given rubber knives, hatchets, everything was rubber. One of us was a fetish — how do you call it?’

‘Fetishist.’

‘He was happy. We were supposed to rid ourselves of our in — ah, what is the word?’

‘Inhibitions.’

‘Something like that, yes. At the end of the first day we begged for steel weapons. We wanted murder, my friend, we wanted murder.’

I had been laughing soundlessly, with my fist pressed to my mouth, at his excitement and growing incoherence. But soon I stopped, hearing mysterious black echoes reverberating in the distance. Erik put on his spectacles again, and sighed.

‘What will you do now, Ben White?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You are afraid.’

‘Ha.’

He nodded slowly, but I had the notion that he was agreeing with some secret thought of his own. For a moment I felt an enormous, inexplicable pity for him. Or perhaps it was myself that I pitied. He finished the wine in his glass, and slowly refilled it. A wave of pure weariness that was tangible came off him.

‘Sometimes you lose the meaning of things, and everything is just … funny.’

He breathed the last word on a sighing fall of breath. He was mocking us both, but there was a grain of real despair in his voice. Not knowing what I meant, I said to comfort him,

‘There’s magic to combat any force.’

‘Do you really believe in the power of magic?’

‘Yes.’

Suddenly he grinned, and asked,

‘But then people are murdered in the street before you, and where is the magic to combat that, eh my friend?’

My gaze shifted to the street, the dark, and my fingers sought each other in my lap, found and clasped. A little wind came in at the door, carrying with it odours out of the deadened pits of that murderous day. Something flew past in the street; dark bird or bat. I waited, hardly breathing, for the shuffle of claws, and the squeaking of bloodied mouths, the soughing of dark wings high in the air. A small child entered, and stopped before our table. Erik quickly drew in his breath. The child offered me a scrap of paper. I shifted under that impassive stare, and took the paper. Strange hieroglyphs were printed there, a message without meaning.