He has taken the dogs out with him. Griffin and Volley: Griffin a beautiful flat coated retriever with a mouth as soft as velvet, and Volley an Australian Shepherd, beautiful too, but also strange-looking, with one milky blue eye and a marbled coat like ink dropped into water. They actually seem to like him, seem not to sense the darkness in him in the same way that people do.
Both of the dogs are skittish, excited, this evening. It’s the promise of the snow in the air, he’s sure – the scent sharpening, metallic, strange. There has been nothing in the forecast, but in a place like this you learn to trust what you can see and smell over any supposed science.
He’ll have to go and warn the bloody guests about it tomorrow. There could be a lot of it coming. If they need any groceries for the next few days they’ll have to let him know by this evening. If it’s a bona fide dump, the track will be impossible to navigate, even in the Land Rover – even with the snow tyres on. No one will be able to get back in here. Or out.
He picks up a stick from the path and throws it. It disappears outside the beam of his head-torch beyond his vision. Both dogs hurtle after it, their sight keener than his. They are almost a match for speed, though Griffin is getting old, and slackens her pace first. Volley bounds ahead, true to his name, and takes the prize, tail wagging furiously, an unmistakable air of triumph in the proud way he holds his head.
At times like this Doug breathes easier.
Now, Volley has dropped the stick, and begun to whine. ‘What is it boy? Hey, what is it?’
Griffin has caught the scent too. They begin to follow it, muzzles down. A rabbit, perhaps, or a fox. Maybe even a deer, though they don’t tend to come around the side of the loch as regularly. Then Doug hears something a little way off: the noise of a large animal passing through the undergrowth beside the path. ‘Who’s there?’ he calls.
No answer, but the unmistakable noise of snapping and tearing continues, at a greater pace. Something – or someone – is running from them.
The dogs tear ahead, after the sound. He calls them back. They turn and trot back to him; reluctant, but obedient. If it’s another of the guests, the dogs could terrify them.
Doug flashes the beam of his torch on the earth around him and illuminates a man’s footprint a few feet ahead. Just one; apparently this is the only part of the path soft enough to take an impression. A large foot. He places his own inside it: roughly the same size. Might be one of the guests of course, though he would be very surprised if they’d got this far from the Lodge in their evening explorations. He’d heard them down by the lake before supper, but he doubts they would have ventured much further in the dark. And this boot has a good tread on it. The London guests all turned up wearing city people’s idea of rugged outdoor wear – Dubarry boots and Timberlands.
The Icelanders then, perhaps, with their proper boots. But the question remains: why would any of the guests have run away, when he called?
He often comes out at this time to check for anything untoward. Some of his night-time forays, however, are not so intentional.
Once he woke up and discovered himself lying in the damp heather a little way from the other end of the loch, near the deserted Scout camp. It was the middle of the night, but luckily there was enough of a moon for him to see where he was. He had no memory of how he had got there, but his legs ached as though he had been running. His hands stung. Later, in the light of the cottage, he would discover that they were lacerated by cuts and grazes, in a couple of places very deeply.
He could not remember anything that had happened before this point. Once, as a boy, he had a general anaesthetic. It had been a black curtain coming down upon his consciousness, a light switched off, the time lost like the blink of an eye. These were like that. Great mouthfuls of time swallowed, leaving voids in their place. He could have been anywhere. He could have done anything.
It had happened to him in the city, too. That was worse: then he had ended up on the other side of town, had come around wandering in unknown streets, or lying in a children’s playground, or stumbling his way down a railway siding.
There is a word for it, a word that sounds like a piece of music: fugue. A beautiful word for something so terrifying. They were brought on by the trauma, the psychiatrist said. They were a symptom, not a condition in and of themselves. The first thing he had to do was start talking about what had happened to him. He understood that, didn’t he? Because this problem, while so far it hasn’t caused any great harm other than a few confusing nights – well, it could be dangerous. For himself. For others around him. After all, there was already the incident in question: the very reason he was having the sessions.
‘Yes,’ he had said, looking the psychiatrist right in the eye. ‘But that didn’t happen in a fugue state. I knew exactly what I was doing then.’
The psychiatrist had coughed, looked uncomfortable. ‘Still: I think we have established that both the incident and these episodes, directly or less so, stem from the same trauma.’
There had been an enforced number of sessions, though the psychiatrist wrote in her report that she believed they needed more. He double-checked: this was only advisory, not mandated. He was free to ignore her advice. He couldn’t quite believe that he had got off so easily, and he suspected that she couldn’t, either. It had stuck with him though, the idea that he could hurt someone: not intentionally, as the other thing had been, but without even knowing what he was doing. So instead of getting to the bottom of the issue – because he didn’t think he could ever talk about that day, even if it were to save his life – he has come somewhere where there are very few people that he could hurt.
He waits for a while longer at the edge of the trees, his ears prickling for any further movement. But there’s nothing, and the dogs seem to have lost interest too. He turns and tramps back along the path in the direction he has come.
When he returns to the cottage he lies back on his bed, fully clothed. Allows himself, finally, to hope for the possibility of sleep.
The room is spartan. Here there are no pictures upon the walls, no knick-knacks on the shelves, which hold only a couple of slim volumes: a book of short stories, a collection of poems. He never reads these days, but they are clues, tethers to the person he used to be. There is nothing here to tell you about the man who inhabits the room, unless the nothing is in itself a clue to something. It has the anonymity of a prison cell. This, if one knew him, which no one does well, is no coincidence.
He turns onto his side, and closes his eyes. It is a mimicry of sleep. If he is lucky he will get perhaps an hour – maybe even two – of rest. He has learned to exist on this, to drink enough coffee to combat the dizziness, to take enough painkillers to mask, as much as possible, the migraines. There was a time when he used to sleep the deep, untroubled sleep of an animal. He cannot imagine it now. That life belonged to a different man. Now every time he closes his eyes he sees their faces. With pleading eyes they ask him: Why us? What did we do to deserve it? Their hands grope for him, catch at his hair, his clothes. He can feel them on him – he has to fight them off. Even when he opens his eyes he can feel the ghost traces of their fingertips upon his skin: cobweb memories.
NOW
2nd January 2019
HEATHER
After I call the police, I dial the boss’s number, in London. I don’t get through to him first, of course: it’s a silken-voiced PA. ‘How can I help?’
I tell her everything. There’s a stunned silence on the line, then: ‘I’ll put you through to him,’ she says, in a much more ordinary voice, as though she has quickly decided that the husky purr isn’t appropriate here.
He comes on the line quickly. ‘Hello Heather,’ he says, as familiarly as if we talk every day on the phone like this. From the one time I met him, I remember him being quite handsome (though difficult to say whether that was just the effect of good grooming, and all that charm), with the smile of a politician.