But for the moment, because she was still standing there, I added, “In fact you needn’t be at all concerned, because I find the room private and very pleasant. As for complaints: I simply don’t have any! I would have to be very fussy to call one small fault a complaint, now wouldn’t I? And—”
“—A fault?” she cut me off. “Something…well, not quite right? Something you find just a little, er, odd, perhaps?” Her voice was beginning to shake along with her hands.
“No,” I quickly answered, finding her nervousness—or perhaps more properly her anxiety—disconcerting. “Nothing at all that you might call ‘odd.’” Which again wasn’t the entire truth. “It’s just the view, Mrs. Anderson! Just the view from the balcony.” By which I meant the partial or sidelong view of the sea-front, the beach, and the blue expanse of the bay itself.
But she obviously thought I meant something else. “The view across the road,” she said with a knowing nod. “And up the hill to that awful old place.” And even though she was steadier now, still her words had come out as breathless as a whisper.
“No, really—” I began, shaking my head. “I’m only talking about—”
But she had already turned and was moving a little unsteadily away; and over her shoulder, interrupting me before I could continue, she very quietly said, “Well if I were you, Mr. Smith, I wouldn’t look at it. Yes, it’s best not to look at it, that’s all…”
And that did it. Whatever this thing is in me—this lodestone that forever seeks to point me toward the strange and the nonesuch—I was feeling it now as an almost tangible force. And of course I knew that having begun to investigate I must follow it through and track the mystery down. Because if once again I was about to come face to face with…well whatever, then I damn well wanted to know everything there was to know about it!
And so I stayed there at that corner table, nursing nothing like a real drink, for at least another hour; until it was dark out and the bar had all but emptied; and still Gavin McCann had not returned. Finally, as the last few guests went off to their rooms or wherever, and the Czech girl was shuttering the bar, I went to her and inquired after the Seaview’s chef.
“Gavin?” she said, smiling. “Oh, he’ll have gone into town. I think there a place where they playing the jazz musics. Gavin like a lot these musics. He going most nights.”
More than a little frustrated, I said my thanks, goodnight, and went up to my room. There was always tomorrow…perhaps I could find this jazz bar tomorrow night. But in any case, right now I was feeling tired. It had been a long day.
And a weird one…
I went out on my balcony, sat in the deckchair in the darkness, with only the street lighting, the glimmer of myriad stars in a clear sky, and the sweeping headlights of vehicles on the steep road for company. Though the flow of the traffic wasn’t especially heavy, still the engine sounds of the cars seemed subdued. Which wasn’t so strange really, because as I had already noted—and as McCann had pointed out in detailing Kevin Anderson’s tragic fall—the balcony was some nine or ten feet above the pavement. This meant that most of the noise was muffled, contained within the road’s canyon-like cutting, while the rest of it was deflected upwards by the balcony’s wall.
With Anderson’s demise in mind, I went to the low wall and looked over. Hard to imagine that someone toppling to the road from here could actually kill himself. Or maybe not, not if he fell on his head. But as for broken ribs: well, that was difficult to picture. Was it possible he’d slipped and fallen with his chest across the wall before he toppled over?
I shook my head, went and sat down again.
The night was refreshingly cool now. To my right, far down below, the glow of seafront illuminations fell on a straggle of couples in holiday finery, strolling arm in arm along the promenade. But I was straining my neck again, and in a little while I averted my gaze, repositioned and reclined my deckchair, and lay back more or less at ease.
Looking across the road and up at a steep angle, I saw the upper reaches of the hillside silhouetted as a solid black mass set against a faint blue nimbus: the glow from the town centre, nestled in a shallow valley lying just beyond the ridge. But as my eyes gradually adjusted, so the silhouette took on a variety of dusky shapes, the most recognizable being that of the derelict hotel.
Where before warm summer sunlight had come slanting through the flat roof’s ornamental gables, now there was only the glow of the hidden town’s lights…like huge three-cornered eyes, burning faintly in the night. And the longer I looked the more acute my night vision became, so that soon the hotel’s entire façade was visible to me, if only in degrees of grey and black shade. But…that feeling, that sensation, of other, perhaps inimical eyes staring at me was back, and it was persistent. I gave myself a shake, told myself to wake up, laughed at my own fancies. But then, when the chuckles had died away, I strained my eyes more yet to penetrate the night, the smoky frontage of that forsaken old place. And as before I examined its façade—or what I could see of it—from top to toe.
First the flat roof and false gables with their background glow: ghostly but lifeless, inert. Next the face of the place: its window eyes—yet more eyes, yes, but glazed and blind—staring sightlessly out over their balconies. And three floors down the balustraded patio with its trio of guardian parasols.
Except now they were no longer a trio, only a pair…
I stared harder yet. On the far right, as before, that one leaned like a bowsprit or a slender figurehead over the corner of the parapet wall. At the far left its opposite number—the one with the partly collapsed canopy—continued to stand upright, but in the still of the night its torn canvas no longer flapped but simply hung there like a dislodged bandage.
So then, maybe the third member of the watch, the one that had seemed intact, had finally fallen over, the victim of gravity or a rotted, broken pole, or both.
But here an odd and fanciful thought. Perhaps there was a reason—albeit a hitherto subconscious one—why I imagined and likened these inanimate things to sentinels, guardians, or more properly yet guardian angels: simply that there was something about them. But what? At which point in my introspection, as my gaze continued its semi-automatic descent down the overgrown hillside’s night dark terraces, I discovered the missing parasol.
It stood half-way down the terraces facing in my direction. Now I say “facing” because in the darkness it had taken on the looks of a basically human figure that seemed to be gazing out across the bay…or perhaps not. Perhaps it was staring down at me?
Let me explain, because I’m pretty sure that you will know what I mean—that you will have seen and even sheltered from the sun under any number of these eight-foot-tall umbrellas in as many hotel gardens and forecourts home and abroad—and so will recognize the following description and understand what I am trying to say.
At the apex of a parasol, its spokes are hinged on a tough wire ring threaded through a circular wooden block. Now this is a vulnerable junction of moving parts—indeed the most important part of the entire ensemble—for which reason it is protected overhead by a scalloped canvas cowl which also serves to overlap the main canopy, keeping unseasonal rains out. When the parasol is not in use and folded down, however, this cowl often looks like a small tent atop the main body of the thing.