Trigger Warning

He paused. ‘You’ll get a better idea of how things lie when we get to the top of the hill.’

‘How do they lie?’

‘At the top of the hill.’

The hill was getting steeper and steeper. My left knee had been injured the previous winter, in a fall on the ice, which meant I could no longer run fast, and these days I found hills and steps extremely taxing. With each step my knee would twinge, reminding me, angrily, of its existence.

Many people, on learning that the local oddity they wished to visit had burned down some years before, would simply have gotten back into their cars and driven on towards their final destination. I am not so easily deterred. The finest things I have seen are dead places: a shuttered amusement park I entered by bribing a night watchman with the price of a drink; an abandoned barn in which, the farmer said, half a dozen bigfoots had been living the summer before. He said they howled at night, and that they stank, but that they had moved on almost a year ago. There was a rank animal smell that lingered in that place, but it might have been coyotes.

‘When the moon waned, they walked the lunar labyrinth with love,’ said my guide. ‘As it waxed, they walked with desire, not with love. Do I have to explain the difference to you? The sheep and the goats?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘The sick came, too, sometimes. The damaged and the disabled came, and some of them needed to be wheeled through the labyrinth, or carried. But even they had to choose the path they travelled, not the people carrying them or wheeling them. Nobody chose their paths but them. When I was a boy people called them cripples. I’m glad we don’t call them cripples any longer. The lovelorn came, too. The alone. The lunatics – they were brought here, sometimes. Got their name from the moon, it was only fair the moon had a chance to fix things.’

We were approaching the top of the hill. It was dusk. The sky was the colour of wine, now, and the clouds in the west glowed with the light of the setting sun, although from where we were standing it had already dropped below the horizon.

‘You’ll see, when we get up there. It’s perfectly flat, the top of the hill.’

I wanted to contribute something, so I said, ‘Where I come from, five hundred years ago the local lord was visiting the king. And the king showed off his enormous table, his candles, his beautiful painted ceiling, and as each one was displayed, instead of praising it, the lord simply said, “I have a finer, and bigger, and better one.” The king wanted to call his bluff, so he told him that the following month he would come and eat at this table, bigger and finer than the king’s, lit by candles in candleholders bigger and finer than the king’s, under a ceiling painting bigger and better than the king’s.’

My guide said, ‘Did he lay out a tablecloth on the flatness of the hill, and have twenty brave men holding candles, and did they dine beneath God’s own stars? They tell a story like that in these parts, too.’

‘That’s the story,’ I admitted, slightly miffed that my contribution had been so casually dismissed. ‘And the king acknowledged that the lord was right.’

‘Didn’t the boss have him imprisoned, and tortured?’ asked my guide. ‘That’s what happened in the version of the story they tell hereabouts. They say that the man never even made it as far as the Cordon-bleu dessert his chef had whipped up. They found him on the following day with his hands cut off, his severed tongue placed neatly in his breast pocket and a final bullet-hole in his forehead.’

‘Here? In the house back there?’

‘Good lord, no. They left his body in his nightclub. Over in the city.’

I was surprised how quickly dusk had ended. There was still a glow in the west, but the rest of the sky had become night, plum-purple in its majesty.

‘The days before the full of the moon, in the labyrinth,’ he said. ‘They were set aside for the infirm, and those in need. My sister had a women’s condition. They told her it would be fatal if she didn’t have her insides all scraped out, and then it might be fatal anyway. Her stomach had swollen up as if she was carrying a baby, not a tumour, although she must have been pushing fifty. She came up here when the moon was a day from full and she walked the labyrinth. Walked it from the outside in, in the moon’s light, and she walked it from the centre back to the outside, with no false steps or mistakes.’

‘What happened to her?’

‘She lived,’ he said, shortly.

We crested the hill, but I could not see what I was looking at. It was too dark.

‘They delivered her of the thing inside her. It lived as well, for a while.’ He paused. Then he tapped my arm. ‘Look over there.’