It didn’t take long for the streets to sap what little courage I’d injected myself with. It was like running through a dream where the horror you fear round each corner turns out to be the horror of nothing at all. No one leant on their fences, passing the time of day. No one was hanging out washing. No little children ran carelessly through the streets or up the cobbled alleys. No one, in short, was doing anything. All there was to see was rows of dirty houses, many with upper windows which seemed to have been boarded up. It was a ghost town.
And then I found something. Or thought I did.
I was moving a little more slowly by then, fifteen years of cigarettes taking their toll. To be absolutely honest I was bent over near a street corner, hands on my knees, vigorously coughing my guts up. When the fit subsided I raised my head and thought I heard something. A piping sound.
Jerking myself upright, I snapped my head this way and that, trying to determine where the sound was coming from. I thought it might be from back the way I’d come, perhaps in a parallel road, and jogged up the street. I couldn’t hear anything there, but I ducked into the next side road anyway. There I heard the sound again, a little louder, and something else: the rustle of distant conversation. Casting a fearful glance up at the darkening sky I pelted down the road.
I turned the corner cautiously. There was nothing there, but I knew there had been. I’d just missed it. I ran along the road to the next corner and listened, trying to work out which way the procession had gone. I chose left and soon heard noise again, louder this time: an odd tootling music, and the babble of strange voices. The sound made me pause for a moment, and another fragment of the previous evening slipped into my head. Was it a noise like that, an unwholesome and hateful gurgling, which I had heard behind one of the guest house doors?
Suddenly the sounds seemed to be coming from a different direction, and I whirled to follow them. Then, quite by chance, I happened to be looking over the abandoned garden of one of the houses I was passing when I saw something through the gap between it and its neighbour. Three sticks, about a foot apart, moving in the opposite direction to me. As they progressed they appeared to rock slightly, and it was that which made the connection. They weren’t just sticks. I couldn’t be certain, because it was now fairly dark. But to me they looked like little masts.
I’d thought I couldn’t run any faster, that my lungs would surely protest and perhaps burst. But I doubled back on myself and sprinted up the street, taking the corner on the slide. The street was empty but this time I was sure I saw the flicker of someone’s ankle as they disappeared around the corner, and I pelted down the road towards it.
I don’t know what made me glance at the house at the end. It was almost certainly just an accident, something for my head to do while my body did all the running. Just before I reached the end my eyes drifted across the filthy pane of its main window, and what I saw— or thought I saw—terrified me into losing my balance and falling. I seemed to take a long time to fall, and my mind insists that this is what I saw as I did.
A face, almost merged with the shadows of the room behind the window. A face that started off as something else, something unrecognisable and alien, something which slid and twitched into a normal face faster than the eye could see. A normal face that looked a little like the publican’s, and a little like Miss Dawton’s. And like, I realised, that of the old crone from the guest house, especially when we’d returned last night. It wasn’t simply make-up which had made the difference, far from it. If I hadn’t been so drunk I think I would have realised at the time. I think the make-up had been put on to hide something else.
And there was one more thing about the face. It looked a little bit like my mother.
All that passed through my head in the time it took me to fall, and was smacked out of it when my head cracked into a kerbstone.
My knee felt badly grazed and twisted, but I was up on my feet immediately, backing hurriedly away from the house. There was nothing to see in the window. No one was there. Maybe they never had been. Nevertheless I turned and ran away.
It started to rain then, at first drizzling, but then settling into a steady downpour. I plodded down one street after another, sometimes thinking I heard something, sometimes hearing nothing but water. My head hurt by then, and blood ran down the side of my face, mingling with the falling rain and running down into my shirt. At the slightest sound I started and whirled around, but too sluggishly to make any difference. I couldn’t seem to think in straight lines. It didn’t feel like it had the night before. It just felt as if I was terribly, miserably frightened.
In the end I gave up and headed towards the square as best I could, limping my way down the tangled streets. It should have occurred to me sooner I suppose, after all, I’d had the right idea in the beginning. I should have stayed where the procession might end. In retrospect I’m glad I was too stupid to realise that, but at the time I wearily cursed myself.
It didn’t make any difference. The square was still deserted. But they’d been there. That much was clear from the very atmosphere, from the feeling of recently emptied space. It was also obvious from the scraps of paper lying in gutters, which hadn’t been there before. I squatted to pick one or two of the sodden pieces up. They were from the pamphlet, as I might have expected. Yogsogo... one fragment said.... thulu mw’yleh iä... read another. Late, far too late, I wondered if it all meant something, if it was something more than a local idiosyncrasy or the result of a blind typist. I don’t think I can be blamed for not suspecting that earlier. All I’d wanted was a weekend out of London. I wasn’t expecting anything else.
Looking back up through the slanting rain I noticed something. From where I was it looked as if the door to the pub was now open. I got up and walked towards it, taking occasional paranoid glances into the darkness at the other corners of the square.
No light was showing, but the door was open. The publican had left his pub. The landlady had abandoned her guest house. Were these people so trusting, or did they simply not care? My face in an unconscious wince of tension, I carefully pushed the door open a little farther. No sound came from the room, and when I poked my head cautiously within I saw it was completely empty. I stepped in. The room looked much as it had when I’d last been there, except at the bar. The flap which allowed access to the bar area had been lifted up and left that way, and the door behind was also open. I walked over and, wishing I had a God or religion to invoke, stepped behind the bar.
The first thing I did was to peer into the gloom of the second room, the one you could just see when standing at the bar. I couldn’t see much except chairs, all of the unusual shape. Then I turned and looked through the other door. The wall beyond was panelled with dark wood, and the narrow corridor it formed a part of stopped just past the door. I stepped through and looked to the left. Stone steps led down into darkness. I felt around for a light but couldn’t find one. Even if I had I doubt I would have had the courage to use it.
I thought for a moment before starting down. I wondered about running back to the guest house, checking if Susan had returned. Perhaps the Festival had ended, and she was waiting impatiently in the sitting room, wondering where I was.
I don’t know why I didn’t believe that was the way things were. I simply didn’t, and I went down the steps instead.
There were a good number of them, and they went straight down. It was pitch dark almost from the top, and I walked down with a hand braced against the walls on each side of me. My head was still hurting, indeed it seemed to be getting worse. When I shut my eyes it felt almost as if a small light were beginning to glow in my temple, so I kept them open, little difference though it made to my progress.