Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

Shadow thanked him, then asked him for an early-morning alarm call. He wished he had been able to find the house he had seen from the hill on the map, but perhaps he had been looking in the wrong place. It wouldn’t be the first time.

The couple in the room next door were fighting, or making love. Shadow could not tell, but each time he began to drift off to sleep raised voices or cries would jerk him awake.

Later, he was never certain if it had really happened, if she had really come to him, or if it had been the first of that night’s dreams: but in truth or in dreams, shortly before midnight by the bedside clock radio, there was a knock on his bedroom door. He got up. Called, “Who is it?”

“Jennie.”

He opened the door, winced at the light in the hall.

She was wrapped in her brown coat, and she looked up at him hesitantly.

“Yes?” said Shadow.

“You’ll be going to the house tomorrow,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I thought I should say good-bye,” she said. “In case I don’t get a chance to see you again. And if you don’t come back to the hotel. And you just go on somewhere. And I never see you.”

“Well, good-bye, then,” said Shadow.

She looked him up and down, examining the T-shirt and the boxers he slept in, at his bare feet, then up at his face. She seemed worried. “You know where I live,” she said, at last. “Call me if you need me.”

She reached her index finger out and touched it gently to his lips. Her finger was very cold. Then she took a step back into the corridor and just stood there, facing him, making no move to go.

Shadow closed the hotel room door, and he heard her footsteps walking away down the corridor. He climbed back into bed.

He was sure that the next dream was a dream, though. It was his life, jumbled and twisted: one moment he was in prison, teaching himself coin tricks and telling himself that his love for his wife would get him through this. Then Laura was dead, and he was out of prison; he was working as a bodyguard to an old grifter who had told Shadow to call him Wednesday. And then his dream was filled with gods: old, forgotten gods, unloved and abandoned, and new gods, transient scared things, duped and confused. It was a tangle of improbabilities, a cat’s cradle which became a web which became a net which became a skein as big as a world…

In his dream he died on the tree.

In his dream he came back from the dead.

And after that there was darkness.

IV

The telephone beside the bed shrilled at seven. He showered, shaved, dressed, packed his world into his backpack. Then he went down to the restaurant for breakfast: salty porridge, limp bacon, and oily fried eggs. The coffee, though, was surprisingly good.

At ten past eight he was in the lobby, waiting.

At fourteen minutes past eight, a man came in, wearing a sheepskin coat. He was sucking on a hand-rolled cigarette. The man stuck out his hand, cheerfully. “You’ll be Mister Moon,” he said. “My name’s Smith. I’m your lift out to the big house.” The man’s grip was firm. “You are a big feller, aren’t you?”

Unspoken was, “But I could take you,” although Shadow knew that it was there.

Shadow said, “So they tell me. You aren’t Scottish.”

“Not me, matey. Just up for the week to make sure that everything runs like it’s s’posed to. I’m a London boy.” A flash of teeth in a hatchet-blade face. Shadow guessed that the man was in his mid-forties. “Come on out to the car. I can bring you up to speed on the way. Is that your bag?”

Shadow carried his backpack out to the car, a muddy Land Rover, its engine still running. He dropped it in the back, climbed into the passenger seat. Smith pulled one final drag on his cigarette, now little more than a rolled stub of white paper, and threw it out of the open driver’s-side window into the road.

They drove out of the village.

“So how do I pronounce your name?” asked Smith. “Bal-der or Borl-der, or something else? Like Cholmondely is actually pronounced Chumley.”

“Shadow,” said Shadow. “People call me Shadow.”

“Right.”

Silence.

“So,” said Smith. “Shadow. I don’t know how much old Gaskell told you about the party this weekend.”

“A little.”

“Right, well, the most important thing to know is this. Anything that happens, you keep shtum about. Right? Whatever you see, people having a little bit of fun, you don’t say nothing to anybody, even if you recognize them, if you take my meaning.”

“I don’t recognize people,” said Shadow.

“That’s the spirit. We’re just here to make sure that everyone has a good time without being disturbed. They’ve come a long way for a nice weekend.”

“Got it,” said Shadow.

They reached the ferry to the cape. Smith parked the Land Rover beside the road, took their bags, and locked the car.

On the other side of the ferry crossing, an identical Land Rover waited. Smith unlocked it, threw their bags in the back, and started along the dirt track.