The Nonesuch and Others Page 9

  Holding my breath, I stopped breathing the thing’s poisons and thrust my glowing lamp deep into the ugly gash of its mouth. The lamp, too, had a canopy of sorts: its shade, which crumpled up and fell apart as the electric bulb penetrated the monster’s pulsing, dribbling mouth. Only moments ago energized, that bulb couldn’t be very warm, but still it was hot enough to alarm the thing.

  Muscles inside the mouth closed on the bulb like a ray fish crushing a mollusk—and the bulb exploded with a loud popping sound. The thing’s mouth was lacerated internally. It spat thin shards of glass into my face, however harmlessly, thank God; it also spat foul, stinking yellow fluid, its blood, and commenced a violent shuddering as it jerked up and away from my face and upper torso.

  Then, trying to yell, I only succeeded in gasping, and when at last I could breathe properly I shouted my outrage. This was as much to hasten the creature’s retreat as an expression of my horror. Vivid curses poured out of me as I reached up and tried to throttle its central column, a thin stem of a “body”; and as if these breathy obscenities had helped to inflate it, the monster’s canopy bulged and began to open.

  Still shuddering, now it convulsed, and chitin hooks on the ends of its flailing tentacles caught on the frame of my single bed, turning it on its side. Saying a silent prayer of thanks, I sprawled on the floor, from where I could see the thing’s mushroom shape, its silhouette, against a faint night glow. In full flight now, it was desperately squeezing the bulk of its partly opened canopy out through the sliding doors onto the balcony.

  Getting up from the floor I lunged after it. I didn’t know what I could do, if anything, but I was more angry than afraid. It wasn’t my fault that this creature, like others I had known, was attracted to me—or me to them, whichever—and I wanted it, them, to know we could fight back, that men could be deadly dangerous too.

  And still shouting at the top of my voice I rushed out onto the balcony where, fully inflated, the monster was now drifting aloft. How such a thing could fly or glide—well, don’t ask me—perhaps by generating gasses within its mantle? I don’t know. But anyway I tried to get hold of the clawed, club-like foot at the base of its slimy stem of a body. It was a wasted effort; I couldn’t get a grip and those retractable claws were sharp.

  In another moment it was gone, rising into darkness, ascending by means of unknown gravity-defying abilities, assisted by the smallest of breezes off the sea.

  “Damn you, you bastard thing!” I yelled after it, and suddenly realized that for some little time I’d been hearing a loud hammering at my door. And there I was, leaning across the balcony wall, when the door to the landing crashed inwards from its hinges and Gavin McCann lurched into the room. Close behind the Scotsman came a shrill Janet Anderson, both she and he in night clothes under their dressing-gowns.

  While a single dim night-light was burning on the landing, the ceiling light in my room had remained switched off since I came up from the bar. Which meant the eyes of the newcomers—my would-be rescuers—would take a moment or two to adjust to the gloom. And indeed I clearly heard McCann’s gasping, urgent question: “Damn! Where’s the bleddy light switch?”

  That and Janet Anderson’s trembling, panted answer: “Here, Gavin—I know where it is—let me do it!” But then, before she could find the switch:

  That smell, a faint fungus reek wafting down to me where I leaned out across the balcony wall and scanned the sky. It came from…from over there, yes, borne on the breeze off the sea! And as I turned my eyes toward the bay at that awkward angle, I saw something blot the moon in the instant before the monster’s clawed, club-like foot swung at me like a pendulum, catching in my shirt.

  I was almost but not quite dragged bodily from the balcony; I felt my shirt rip, and I fell! I fell—

  —But on the inside of the wall. Brilliant lights flashed in my head as my skull cracked against the top of the wall; my body flopped to the floor; and the very last thing I remember: Janet Anderson’s arms cradling me, and her sobbing, hysterical voice fading into a painful, rushing darkness as she questioned me: “What happened, Mr. Smith? What did you see? Was it…was it the nun?”

  And then, nothing…

  I had suffered a cut scalp and very bad concussion, which kept me out of it for four days, three of which I was semiconscious and had my doctors fearing there could even be some brain damage. While that might seem serious enough, poor Janet Anderson had suffered rather more: a total nervous breakdown. She spent a month in what was referred to euphemistically as “a refuge,” the secured mental wing of a local hospital.

  As for the Seaview’s chef, bless his heart: in addition to cooking and helping Hannah to run the hotel, Gavin McCann dedicated what was left of his time during that period to visiting Janet Anderson and myself in equal measure: his employer out of friendship and loyalty, and myself, oddly enough, out of guilt. And it was during one such visit after I returned to full consciousness that he asked me what it was all about: what exactly had I seen?

  But I didn’t tell him. For from the moment I had opened my eyes to perceive the world afresh, I had been thinking it over. And I had come to a conclusion, settled on an explanation which I might at least attempt to believe. For let’s face it, I still could not state with absolute conviction that there really were thin, telegraph-pole-tall people in London; I couldn’t swear to them any more than to pink elephants! And likewise clowns—or at least one such—on stilts!

  What, a clown with stilt legs, and wings? A clown who flew away with a small girl’s smaller dog and who would, presumably, if they were available, fly off with other rather more meaningful small things? No, of course I couldn’t believe in him. Not while it was even remotely possible that he had been…well, simply a strikingly original clown, and what I had made of him had been fevered guesswork, imagination and hallucination, but mainly nightmares spawned in a bottle of booze.

  That is what I told myself to believe; I must at least try to believe in that. Because if I failed to do so, then I might have to accept advanced degenerative alcoholic madness. And as for the latter:

  Well, Gavin McCann was able—in his way and mistakenly or not—to corroborate something of what I was forcing myself to accept. And seated by my bed wringing his hands, on that occasion when I had nothing to tell him: “I blame mahsel’!” he said. “Me and the bleddy booze both! I should never have let ye take that short, not knowin’ how it was with ye! Aye, and Janet and me, we found ye’re empty bleddy bottle on the balcony. Man, ye must have been drunk out o’ ye’re mind!”

  Well yes, maybe then. But no more…

  And something a little over a month later—after reading in my Exeter newspaper about a hotel fire in a certain resort: an unsolved case of arson in a disused, derelict building, according to a police report—I called McCann on the number he’d given me to find out what he knew.

  “Aye, that old place on the hill,” he told me, guardedly I thought. “I was in the bar and heard the sirens. Janet was out in the town doin’ some late shoppin’ when it went up. She came in and we watched the blaze taegether. But it was arson, definitely. Why, we could smell the petrol fumes right down there on the balcony o’ room number seven!

  “And do ye know what? That poor woman’s been right as rain ever since!”

  So there you go. I’ve told myself I can stay off the booze and avoid further imaginary confrontations, or I can take the occasional drink and suffer the consequences, whatever.

  But you know, when my mind is clear and the night is dark, I lie in my bed and turn things over in my head, and then it’s as if I am fully in touch with unnatural Nature. I’ve heard of the octopuses that imitate coconuts to “stroll” on their dangling tentacles through dangerous shallows. I’ve read of insects that imitate leaves, and seahorse fishes that are indistinguishable from the seaweeds they live in. There are so many kinds of insects, plants and animals that pretend for their security or, as often as not, their fell purposes to be other than they are. And there are thous
ands of small species that aren’t even catalogued as yet.

  And that’s only the small species…

  As for me and my problem, if indeed I have a problem other than the alcohol: can it be coincidence, pure and simple? Or is it that I am in fact a lodestone, a lightning-rod for the weird and the wonderful? Because if the latter is true, then it seems I’m actually destined to be drawn to such things: to these thin people, these clowns-on-stilts, these nuns and nonesuches.

  In which case so be it.

  But if I can’t avoid them, you can at least be sure I’ll be looking out for them!