‘I didn’t know he had fish on board.’
‘Well, perhaps not,’ Daniel admitted. ‘The Flood wouldn’t have troubled them, I don’t suppose. Though some of them might have got stranded in some strange places when the waters went down.’
Marc shrugged. He was still studying the four men. ‘The others aren’t wearing masks.’
‘They may put them on later. I expect your face gets hot under one of those things on a day like this.’
Marc grimaced and pushed his half-empty glass of cola to the centre of the table. ‘You were going to ask the way to the car.’
‘Yup; you’re right. We should be going.’
Feeling, nevertheless, rather irresolute, Daniel rose again from his sunken seat and approached the person nearest to him at the bar.
‘Excuse me.’ He tapped the man lightly on the arm, then repeated the request for directions he had made to the elderly pedestrian earlier. There was no immediate response, though the man tensed, so Daniel knew he had made some kind of contact. He remained where he was, aware that he loomed rather over the assembled company. He deliberately laid a hand on the counter where he knew it would be seen by the person standing beside him, and drummed his fingers hopefully on the beer-soaked wooden surface. At last the man swivelled round from the hips, looked up, and gave Daniel a hard stare. He had a raw, red face, cracked at angles around the nose and mouth like old leather, and tiny, round eyes: very tiny eyes, Daniel thought, and felt himself gasp as he looked into them. About the same size and shape as his thumb nail, they were as insensate and uncomprehending as stones, and shone brightly, as though they had been polished. Daniel dropped his own gaze away from them at once, down to the man’s mouth, that was slowly opening.
Nearby, someone began to chatter in what sounded like a foreign language. The man next to Daniel, speaking backwards over his shoulder, answered in the same tongue. The men exchanged a few short sentences, their voices clicking and clucking like angry chickens, or so it seemed to Daniel’s ears, then both fell silent. The person Daniel had originally addressed turned back towards his companion then, deliberately, in a gesture positively dismissive of himself, Daniel thought.
He was annoyed with this treatment, but alarmed as well. At first, he had half-suspected the men were speaking in made-up gibberish, to make fun of him, but the absolute lack of any sign of humour in their expressions; in their lack, indeed, of recognizable emotions on their faces at all; and the absence of any motive to mock him that he could think of, made him doubt the truth of that surmise. And the man’s little eyes! Those utterly strange crystalline eyes that had registered absolutely nothing when they had been turned towards him, as though he had been invisible!
Except to turn to look at him, the man had totally ignored him, though he suspected he was the subject of the exchange of speech that had then ensued.
Now feeling almost desperately in need of the simple information he had been seeking, Daniel was tempted to move down the line of men and try again with someone else. Then he remembered Marc’s observation that some of those at the far end were perhaps wearing masks. It occurred to him that the person he had just approached, seen from some distance, might have been thought to have been wearing a mask too, so rigid had been his features. He leaned forwards over the bar and looked down its length, along the front of the line of men, who were all a good six inches or more shorter than himself, in an attempt to get a better angle to take a look at them individually. As he moved, they did too, as though they were joined together by wires.
No, Daniel thought — not quite like that: more like a shoal of fish dipping and turning away through clear water in formation, with perfect coordination, as though they could read each other’s thoughts and intentions!
And, by implication, his, as well.
Though none of them had been looking in his direction, they had changed position in such a way, and so expertly, that he could not see any part of any one of their faces.
He experimented one more time, pushing himself even further forward, with the same result. Each of the little men at once adjusted his posture so as to conceal his own and his nearest companion’s features.
They’re all wearing masks, Daniel thought. Or none of them are. That’s what they’re hiding. None of them have real faces!
He stumbled back away from the bar and spoke Marc’s name sharply. The boy jumped to his feet in consternation at the tone of his father’s voice.
Daniel grabbed his son and hauled him towards the exit flap, which, as they approached it, bulged towards them as someone pushed through into the marquee from the outside. A figure emerged rather hurriedly. A man about five feet tall, his head thatched with layers of short grey hair, with a long, bone-thin, but otherwise normal, mobile face, stood just inside the tent in front of Daniel and Marc. He was not so much clothed as enwrapped, or self-enshrouded, in a full-length cape of some dark, drab material he gripped close about him, and through which only his head and scrawny wrists and hands protruded, his feet being hidden by folds of cloth that trailed the ground around him. The man barred their way by his presence, but there was nothing overtly threatening about him. He held out both hands in front of him at waist height in what could have been a gesture of benediction, then moved one hand further forward purposefully. Somewhat reluctantly, Daniel took it and shook it. The man smiled broadly, arching his eyes in a way that gave him a slightly ludicrous, even clownish, look.
‘Welcome, welcome,’ he gushed, in a high, buzzing voice. ‘It’s good of you to come and support our little gathering. I hope you’ve been having fun.’
Fun? Daniel looked the man in the eyes searching for signs of mockery, or, at least, of irony. He saw none.
‘We just happened to be passing through,’ he explained, ‘and stopped to take a look round. We didn’t come specially to attend this. event.’
The man shook his head sorrowfully. ‘We get so few visitors here,’ he complained. ‘It’s such an out-of-the-way spot. We are, all of us here, in some sense, refugees from the world, if the truth be known, and perhaps a little too isolated. It’s only rarely that anyone discovers our existence, and comes amongst us. When we are discovered, and someone wanders into our community from outside, it’s always a time of great excitement for us. And sadly, very sadly, nobody ever comes back. It’s such a difficult place to find, and people like yourself forget about our existence so easily, so quickly.’
Daniel thought the man must be exaggerating wildly, and wondered if he was quite right in the head. The sample section of the population he had met seemed anything but excited to see visitors.
‘We got lost, actually. Found this place by accident.’
‘Quite so.’
‘Then we mislaid our car.’
‘Really!’ The man made it sound like a clever thing to do.
‘I’d appreciate some help,’ Daniel admitted. ‘Some directions.’
‘Of course you would,’ the man agreed. ‘I can understand that.’
‘We searched about, but seemed to be going round in circles.’
‘Well, yes; you probably were. It’s a maze of a place, our village. It couldn’t be more difficult to find your way about. It’s almost as though it had been designed to confuse.’ All this was said in a cheerful, matter-of-fact way, but was hardly helpful, Daniel thought.
‘We parked the car by the river,’ he said. ‘If you could point us in that direction?’
‘No problem at all.’ The man smiled benignly. ‘The simplest thing in the world.’ He had released his grasp of the huge cloak he was draped in when he had shaken hands. Gradually, it had fallen loose around his neck to reveal a dog-collar. A grubby, grey and frayed dog-collar. ‘The only difficulty is, which part of the river?’ he continued. ‘It flows all around, you see.’