Conrad Williams - Decay Inevitable

Will sat upright. He was perched on the edge of a path. Behind him, an ocean he couldn’t put a name to exploded repetitively on a shingle beach. On the other side of the path, a rank of houses turned tawny-coloured, peeling faces to the view. Made from tired wood, with overgrown gardens and gates that sagged like Friday-night drunkards, not one of the houses looked remotely habitable from Will’s vantage point.

Will too felt a little inebriated. Gathering himself, he rose, which brought a fresh, sarcastic chorus from the parrots. They flapped their wings, exposing deep-red feathers, and points of wild light, as if they were dotted with sequins or bits of broken glass. The air was warm and sweetly spiced, much like his mother’s kitchen had been when he was a boy. She made apple pies on Sunday mornings. Bramley apples that collapsed in a pan with a little more sugar than was strictly necessary. She put cinnamon in the pies, an idea that she pinched from the Americans. They were good pies, especially if they were served hot, with vanilla ice cream.

His mind on pies, he crossed the street to the houses and tried to remember what had happened in the seconds before he became aware again. It was no use. All he could picture was a childish face being obliterated by a black hole that became suddenly, intensely white, splintering like glass in his eyes.

The houses, as he had believed, were uninhabited. Through the windows he saw sofas that sagged with invisible bodies, and tables laid for a coming meal. Coats were piled on the newel post of stairs littered with childhood gear. Now and again, Will would blink, thinking that he saw movement. A hand on the banister; the shadow preceding a body, approaching along the hallway; a dog’s tail wagging. But it was all periphery. Whenever he jerked his head to catch the mote, it would be gone. A flaw in the eye, then. A blight on his focus.

Frustrated, he tried knocking on one of the doors, to prove his conviction that the row was deserted. The door duly opened, but there was nobody behind it. Will went in and hunted for life, room by room. The house didn’t smell old or disused; it smelled of nothing at all. Nobody here. He stalked out of the house and slammed the door shut. Marching across the street, he ignored the guffawing parrots and struck out towards the treacly sun, his boots crunching across the shingle beach.

The tide was out: the dark edge of water, periodically creaming into the shore, was only just distinguishable against the salt-and-pepper beach. The stones were smooth and uniform in size and myriad in colour. Some kind of coral provided relief for the eye, a friable, greyish species that poked from the stones like tiny signposts. A little further along, when he came across the bleached skull of a cat, he realised that the coral was not coral after all. He tried hard not to study the beach after that, and would have returned to the lane were it not for the fact that it petered out, swallowed by more acres of shingle. There was little to break up the skyline apart from the spire of a church that looked as if it should be in a children’s fairy tale: crooked and black, it made an arthritic gesture to the heavens. For want of something better to do, Will angled towards it, fingering the strange puckered mark that had risen on his forehead.

The church sat in the centre of a poorly tended graveyard. Bloated insects he couldn’t identify buzzed drunkenly by him. The trees here were stunted, purposefully it seemed, their heads lopped off before they could reach a certain height. Their boughs were famished affairs, the branches leeched of colour and as brittle as the bones on the beach, as if the stuff that lay in the ground was sucking the life from them. Will strayed off the path and tried to study some of the headstones, though time and neglect and the weather had conspired to polish the headstones almost clean of their inscriptions. This one, though:

Here lies Evelyn Marley, beloved wife of Hector. She died when the knife of a robber split her heart open. Humble Street, where it happened, knows her blood.

And this:

Beneath this stone are the mortal remains of Gregory Phipps who died, aged sixteen, brained by a stone wielded by his father. Ten days he took to die.

And this:

The bodies of Robert and Jessica Bunce feed the worms here. Fire took their sleeping forms and gave them eternal rest.

IT WAS A well-stocked graveyard. The stones encroached on each other’s plots and leaned into each other like poor teeth. Will was about to leave the cemetery when he heard a gritty noise rise up from the bottom of the churchyard. He stealthily padded among the stones until he saw its author: a woman wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat, hacking at the gravelly soil with a trowel.

“Hello?” Will said, grateful to see another soul in this strange wilderness. The woman raised her head and Will was struck with a frustrating sense of recognition which would not reveal itself. “I know you, don’t I?” he asked, approaching.

The woman straightened and searched his face. “I’m afraid you’re at an advantage,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you before in my life.”

“What’s your name?”

“Alice.”

“Alice. No, I don’t know an Alice. But you look like someone I know.”

They stood awkwardly, regarding each other among the bastard cabbage.

“Interesting graveyard,” Will said.

“Isn’t it?”

“But crowded.”

Alice nodded. “Yes, it is a little densely populated. But the beach is a fine overspill.”

“Isn’t that a health hazard?”

“For whom, exactly? The dead?”

Will laughed shrilly, and clammed up. It didn’t feel right. None of it.

“Well, I need to get on,” Alice said, waving her trowel at the weeds. It seemed a pointless chore when so much of the graveyard had already been conquered by yarrow, milfoil and fleabane.

“Don’t let me stop you,” Will said, jollily. “I just wondered if you could tell me where...” The question ran out of steam when he realised how odd he was going to seem when he finished with the hell I am? Without too much of a pause, he diverted to: “...I can find the nearest train station?”

“Oh, trains, they don’t come out this far. What is it? Are you lost?”

“I think so,” Will said. Despite their uncanny conversation, the woman made him feel comfortable. He felt that he could confide in her without embarrassing himself. “I can’t remember where I was about an hour ago. I woke up and I was on a beach. Empty houses.” It sounded so ridiculous when out in the open. “Parrots.”

Alice seemed unimpressed. “There’s a little village, a bit further along the beach, called Gloat Market. You might be able to find somebody to help you there. There’s a pharmacist’s. And a taxi service. They might be able to ride you out to Sud, or Howling Mile, or Mash This. Fair distances, but you’ll find trains there.”

“Gloat Market,” Will said. He didn’t know the place, or the others that Alice had mentioned, but he felt more confident now that he had a few locations to refer to. “Are we in Suffolk?” he asked, but shook his head when she regarded him with bewilderment. “Never mind. Thanks a lot. You’ve been a great help.”

“That’s okay, Will. Travel safe, now.” She reached out and touched his arm.

He waved and tramped towards the cemetery gates. At the threshold he stopped, trying to remember something. He turned back. Sixty feet away, her figure was bent over and earnestly engaged with the trowel, the edge of the blade tearing at the earth.

“How did you know–” he began.

She reared up and he took a reflexive step away. Her eyes glowered at him. The tool dangled from her grip, dribbling what looked like blood into the soft, gritty earth. He was smitten with the impression that she had been able to control who she really was while he talked to her, but that now, with contact broken, she had rediscovered her true form. Will pursed his lips to finish his question, but his mouth had drained of spit. She seemed to lean towards him, but she took off in the opposite direction at speed, moving to the blind side of the church before he could think about pursuing her. Half of her face seemed to be hanging off, a badly knitted balaclava that refused to hug the contours of her head. He hurried back to the beach and tried to calm himself down by reciting the name of the village, Gloat Market, over and over again.