I never want to see this story again
Here it is, written through impulse rather than inspiration. I don't think I ever wrote anything faster in my life. Subsequently it's a torrid, workmanlike affair: but at least I finished something.
Floating in the lightless shaft, I stared at the door through the pounding of the blood in my head and the condensation trickling down the inside of my goggles. My eyes followed the bubbles that rose from our breathing units to cluster in star-like nebulae that minutely mirrored each other on the edges of our sphere of visibility. The fact that I began to sink into such modes of thought, dreamlike amongst our slow motions in the faded nether-world slanting into blackness ... shook me into the realisation that our oxygen supplies were running low. Mark was gently swimming towards the door with his arms outstretched like a sleepwalker: I shook his shoulder and a look from his half-crazed eyes told me that he was already far gone. Suddenly he barrelled into me, and I flew backwards unrestrained, my fingers scrabbling at the bare walls like a cat’s claws over marble. Furiously I kicked back towards him, and knowing myself to be stronger bundled him out of a skylight and up, up through the sunlit shroud of warm waters towards the sky that the blue waves caught and spread outwards like a never-ending horizon above us.
The bends caught me, and I shook them off, never letting go of Mark as we swam hard, not slowing until we had breached the surface. Ripping off our masks, we gasped in fresh air and floated on our backs for several minutes until we had regained the energy to swim to shore. I did not speak until after we had slipped out of our wetsuits and lay naked on the sun-warmed stones of the beach, shivering.
‘W-what the he-hell was that?’
‘I don’t know. S-sorry, alright?’ There was a pause, and then he said, ‘I think there was something wrong with the oxygen levels in my tank.’
‘Never mind th-that! What about all the hi-tech equipm-ment I had going dead l-like that? There’s supposed to be a timer that goes off, g-giving you ten minutes to get to the s-surface!’
‘Probably it’s the famous J-Japanese inconsistency.’
‘Bollocks. One thing’s for sure - I’m not diving until I g-get back to London and h-ave all the electronics re-rewired.’
And that, I maintained, was that, despite Mark’s best efforts to cajole me into reconsidering, as we made our way into the local Swiss village for lunch. Outside the local shop-cum-restaurant we found to our surprise Patroclea sitting serenely on an old wooden bench: as soon as she espied us, she jumped up and made her way over to us as fast as her ladylike manner would allow. To our even greater surprise she greeted Mark coldly and stood before me with her face breaking into a beautiful smile; awkwardly leaning on her left leg with the other crossing over it, she tipped her face to one side and gazed at me. I was just about to identify myself as the wrong man when she opened her mouth and spoke:
‘Dear, dear Anthony! I thought I might find you here - I’ve come to tell you ... I think I’ve fallen in love with you! Everything that Mark told me - about who you are, about what you’ve done - I knew it was true the first moment I looked into your eyes - those dear, blue eyes - I felt myself fall into them like a - oh, like a summer’s sea! Will you let me kiss you?’
I hastily retreated backwards to ward off the immediate danger and cleared my throat: at that moment I would have found it difficult to envisage a more embarrassing scene. Pinned between my twin and his lover and the rage that seemed to rise from Mark like heat waves off a tin roof, I tried to speak with authority and reason.
‘Patr ... Madam, I am afraid that what Mark told you were lies.’
Her eyes filled with tears. ‘Then you don’t really take your children on yachting holidays, or do charity work in Africa, or help out your wife out of a terrible relationship even after she divorced you?’
I turned to Mark in astonishment, and with a bashfulness not helped overmuch by his deep-red countenance. ‘You told her the truth?’ Patroclea gave a cry of joy and before I could escape flung her arms around me and spoke, somewhat into my chest:
‘Then it is true, all of it! Oh, how I laughed when he told me the story of how he lost his first tooth biting your behind - I knew that because of the scar!’ I extricated myself with difficulty from her grasp. ‘You … viewed … my behind?’ She went as red as Mark and I stood there, flanked by two billiard balls.
‘I couldn’t help myself. I kept coming into your room to watch you sleep in the night.’ She paused as something unpleasant flitted across her mind, and her pupils for a second seemed to cloud as her eyes half-closed, drawing down the reflections of her lashes with them. ‘That’s when I screamed and ran away - I was so tired I thought I saw someone with you, doing something to your forehead.’
I ignored the last comment and replied sternly, ‘Patricia, you’re half my age!’ She laughed delightedly. ‘I know! Isn’t love miraculous!’ With that she ran like a schoolgirl across the piazza and was gone. I stared after her speculatively, giving Mark time to get over the indignity of losing a girl to his highly unsophisticated look-alike brother. Then I heard him say:
‘That girl is a complete nut.’
‘Oh, unquestionably.’
With that we turned and entered the shop. In rudimentary French, and over the clink of Euros, I asked the lady behind the counter who it was who had built the house in which we stayed. The shopkeeper paused and twisted her fingers in front of her and extravagantly rolled her eyes heavenward as if preparing to tell a long and often-repeated story. From her we learnt, through the extensive use of our French-English Dictionary, that he had been a magician, and that he had become rich by doing a famous trick that the shop-keeper did not know the particulars of. The house was the legacy of his myth, for it was said that he had summoned it from beneath the snow when it had been destroyed by avalanche (‘nei-ge mou-illee’ ‘I know this one. It’s a type of sandwich.’ ‘Yes, Mark, the house was obviously destroyed by a type of sandwich.’). Then one day, he had disappeared, driving his best friend mad. But it had happened a century before, and they did not like to talk of such things anymore, she said. And then, leaning over the desk, she hissed that it was rumoured that he had not committed suicide at all; he had merely changed forms.
I thanked the woman, caught Mark’s sleeve (he was looking thoroughly bored), and went out of the shop. We went back to the house, talking of this and that, until we reached our diving suits, which lay scattered on the beach like our shadows shorn before the dark-eclipsing brightness of the midday sun. Mark said,
‘I want to check out that house again.’
‘What? Why?’
‘I didn’t finish exploring it.’
‘There’s no way that I’m doing it again; you can just put that thought out of your head. We could have died last time.’
‘That’s just typically selfish of you, Ant. It’s like the Patroclea business.’
‘WHAT? How does that have anything to do with it?’
‘You love to take away things that make me happy. You’re shitting all over me, as usual.’
‘Oh, come ON. That girl was next to nothing to you. You don’t really have strong feelings for anyone, let’s face it.’ Looking into his eyes, I was surprised to find the look that smouldered under his brows: "That’s what you think.". I said weakly,
‘We could have died last time.’ His eyes were strange.
‘That’s what makes the pull so strong.’
As the evening wore on, my arguments became weaker and weaker despite the undeniable logic to them. Mark finally got my word at 10 p.m. He said that we would dive at midnight, and when I questioned this he told me that there would be no light down there anyway, which seemed a reasonable point.
As we tugged the tarpaulin away from our diving equipment on the beach, a sudden glow fell over us from the metal and glass half-hidden in the sand. As we were bathed in the softness of the dimly reflected moonlight I saw in the glimmer a look on Mark’s face that was like an angry, grinning wound, trembling like a fire and burning hot tears from his eyes. I was reminded of when we were children. Once, we had arranged a sheet between us in our bedroom and shone a torch upon it so that the shadows from the sheet were projected onto the wall. Mark danced, and I moved to his beat, knowing when he would turn, stooping and swaying in perfect harmony. I watched our projections dance on the wall, my shadow moving small and dark beneath his dim and monstrous one like two segments of a flame. Laughing, I had torn back the sheet and been frozen by the expression on his face. His eyes were immense and black, and closed like stones; and his face was rent down the middle by no child’s smile but by a terrible, inhuman leer.
We quickly donned our suits, and I turned my back to him so that he could strap on my tank; I felt a cold chill as his hands passed over me. I could still pull out; I had every reason available for doing so, but I knew that he would have gone down into the black depths without me anyway, and I could not let him do it alone. We strapped up, and started the slow walk into the shining, shivering web of the lake. The wind’s musk brought with it some powerful, unrecognisable scent that was deep and heavy, like blood: the waves lapped around me in the bitter cold like mouths filled with broken glass. Suddenly the shelf of beach fell away and I plunged into the black ether of the water. The lake glowed blue beneath me, like a great cathedral of deep shadows that stretched to the glittering ceiling of the waves vaulted over the scene.
As I marvelled at the spectacle, my brother touched my arm and we began the swim into the icy depths, our torches illumining the fracas of weeds that span below us as we approached the ghostly house. Being unable to locate the skylight from whence we had escaped the previous time, we found it necessary to begin at the front door once more. As we entered the house, I looked at Mark and he made the usual gestures but they seemed blurry in the half-light and fell unformed away into the darkness. I tried to steady myself, like a drunk, upon his shoulder, but he shrugged me off and disappeared into the hallway, his light reflected thrice more on the varnished walls and floor.
I was finding it hard to move, and I swam around the house after my brother as through a dull haze. Suddenly there appeared a man, running along the corridor before me. I swam after him, without the ability to call his name out, and then my logical senses told me that you couldn’t run in water; furthermore, he was caped. He stopped at the foot of a broken set of stairs, his back turned to me. Fearfully, I swam up to him, and put my hand on his shoulder. The torch went out, suddenly, and I panicked violently, but in the darkness a luminous face appeared, mere inches from mine. The skin was bloated, like sodden wool packed onto sharp bones, and his mouth was twisted and his lips almost fleshless. But it was the eyes that bored into me, such malevolent, dead eyes; but he was no corpse, for his mouth was moving and grinning: I saw no more, for I tore away.
Swimming fast down the corridor with my hands as feelers along the walls, I tried my torch again and found that it worked. I was in very real danger of fainting, I realised, and there seemed to be something wrong with the oxygen I was breathing. But I had to find my brother; somehow I felt him calling all through the mute and motionless house. I reached the end of the corridor and again my body froze, for there was a small man twisting terribly along the floor as some ethereal light poured down from the brown-papered ceiling. He writhed towards me; turning as if in a dream, I saw the other approaching in the narrow hall. I flung up my arms and closed my eyes; but nothing happened, and turning once more I saw the ghosts meet each other and the taller man collapse. Over his body the small man began to rise, and I saw him raise his head, and his eyes were terrible, like the dark husks of the first man. Over the walls rushed a plethora of shapes; of trees where hanged men swung, of snow cascading through the house and crushing a stooped old man, of a dozen deaths played out in mute shadow-play. Then I heard his laughter and swam again from him, rising through the house and searching for some person I half-remembered. My hallucinations overcame me and I believed that my dead mother chased me with her hands outstretched, only to dissipate as her skeletal fingers reached me.
I chased through the house as my oxygen supplies grew lower and lower, until I came to the room where what I was searching for lay, while the dancing hosts of dead spun around me like a child’s toy lantern. I pushed through the broken door, and before the hollow images of my mind floated my brother, vivid amongst the myopic forms that turned around him. I tried to move him, but his diving equipment was entangled with the skeleton of a man in a chair in the middle of the room; his torch had fallen to the floor. In my mind’s eye, I saw the skeleton not as a corpse but as the magician, grappling with my brother as a blurring twisted between them. I pulled my brother free, and then embraced him as he began to float towards the ceiling. Oblivious to my surroundings, I turned his face to mine despairingly. As his face came into my blurred vision I saw with horror that his dead eyes were blue.
For the alternate (better) ending, go to creativewriter.
Floating in the lightless shaft, I stared at the door through the pounding of the blood in my head and the condensation trickling down the inside of my goggles. My eyes followed the bubbles that rose from our breathing units to cluster in star-like nebulae that minutely mirrored each other on the edges of our sphere of visibility. The fact that I began to sink into such modes of thought, dreamlike amongst our slow motions in the faded nether-world slanting into blackness ... shook me into the realisation that our oxygen supplies were running low. Mark was gently swimming towards the door with his arms outstretched like a sleepwalker: I shook his shoulder and a look from his half-crazed eyes told me that he was already far gone. Suddenly he barrelled into me, and I flew backwards unrestrained, my fingers scrabbling at the bare walls like a cat’s claws over marble. Furiously I kicked back towards him, and knowing myself to be stronger bundled him out of a skylight and up, up through the sunlit shroud of warm waters towards the sky that the blue waves caught and spread outwards like a never-ending horizon above us.
The bends caught me, and I shook them off, never letting go of Mark as we swam hard, not slowing until we had breached the surface. Ripping off our masks, we gasped in fresh air and floated on our backs for several minutes until we had regained the energy to swim to shore. I did not speak until after we had slipped out of our wetsuits and lay naked on the sun-warmed stones of the beach, shivering.
‘W-what the he-hell was that?’
‘I don’t know. S-sorry, alright?’ There was a pause, and then he said, ‘I think there was something wrong with the oxygen levels in my tank.’
‘Never mind th-that! What about all the hi-tech equipm-ment I had going dead l-like that? There’s supposed to be a timer that goes off, g-giving you ten minutes to get to the s-surface!’
‘Probably it’s the famous J-Japanese inconsistency.’
‘Bollocks. One thing’s for sure - I’m not diving until I g-get back to London and h-ave all the electronics re-rewired.’
And that, I maintained, was that, despite Mark’s best efforts to cajole me into reconsidering, as we made our way into the local Swiss village for lunch. Outside the local shop-cum-restaurant we found to our surprise Patroclea sitting serenely on an old wooden bench: as soon as she espied us, she jumped up and made her way over to us as fast as her ladylike manner would allow. To our even greater surprise she greeted Mark coldly and stood before me with her face breaking into a beautiful smile; awkwardly leaning on her left leg with the other crossing over it, she tipped her face to one side and gazed at me. I was just about to identify myself as the wrong man when she opened her mouth and spoke:
‘Dear, dear Anthony! I thought I might find you here - I’ve come to tell you ... I think I’ve fallen in love with you! Everything that Mark told me - about who you are, about what you’ve done - I knew it was true the first moment I looked into your eyes - those dear, blue eyes - I felt myself fall into them like a - oh, like a summer’s sea! Will you let me kiss you?’
I hastily retreated backwards to ward off the immediate danger and cleared my throat: at that moment I would have found it difficult to envisage a more embarrassing scene. Pinned between my twin and his lover and the rage that seemed to rise from Mark like heat waves off a tin roof, I tried to speak with authority and reason.
‘Patr ... Madam, I am afraid that what Mark told you were lies.’
Her eyes filled with tears. ‘Then you don’t really take your children on yachting holidays, or do charity work in Africa, or help out your wife out of a terrible relationship even after she divorced you?’
I turned to Mark in astonishment, and with a bashfulness not helped overmuch by his deep-red countenance. ‘You told her the truth?’ Patroclea gave a cry of joy and before I could escape flung her arms around me and spoke, somewhat into my chest:
‘Then it is true, all of it! Oh, how I laughed when he told me the story of how he lost his first tooth biting your behind - I knew that because of the scar!’ I extricated myself with difficulty from her grasp. ‘You … viewed … my behind?’ She went as red as Mark and I stood there, flanked by two billiard balls.
‘I couldn’t help myself. I kept coming into your room to watch you sleep in the night.’ She paused as something unpleasant flitted across her mind, and her pupils for a second seemed to cloud as her eyes half-closed, drawing down the reflections of her lashes with them. ‘That’s when I screamed and ran away - I was so tired I thought I saw someone with you, doing something to your forehead.’
I ignored the last comment and replied sternly, ‘Patricia, you’re half my age!’ She laughed delightedly. ‘I know! Isn’t love miraculous!’ With that she ran like a schoolgirl across the piazza and was gone. I stared after her speculatively, giving Mark time to get over the indignity of losing a girl to his highly unsophisticated look-alike brother. Then I heard him say:
‘That girl is a complete nut.’
‘Oh, unquestionably.’
With that we turned and entered the shop. In rudimentary French, and over the clink of Euros, I asked the lady behind the counter who it was who had built the house in which we stayed. The shopkeeper paused and twisted her fingers in front of her and extravagantly rolled her eyes heavenward as if preparing to tell a long and often-repeated story. From her we learnt, through the extensive use of our French-English Dictionary, that he had been a magician, and that he had become rich by doing a famous trick that the shop-keeper did not know the particulars of. The house was the legacy of his myth, for it was said that he had summoned it from beneath the snow when it had been destroyed by avalanche (‘nei-ge mou-illee’ ‘I know this one. It’s a type of sandwich.’ ‘Yes, Mark, the house was obviously destroyed by a type of sandwich.’). Then one day, he had disappeared, driving his best friend mad. But it had happened a century before, and they did not like to talk of such things anymore, she said. And then, leaning over the desk, she hissed that it was rumoured that he had not committed suicide at all; he had merely changed forms.
I thanked the woman, caught Mark’s sleeve (he was looking thoroughly bored), and went out of the shop. We went back to the house, talking of this and that, until we reached our diving suits, which lay scattered on the beach like our shadows shorn before the dark-eclipsing brightness of the midday sun. Mark said,
‘I want to check out that house again.’
‘What? Why?’
‘I didn’t finish exploring it.’
‘There’s no way that I’m doing it again; you can just put that thought out of your head. We could have died last time.’
‘That’s just typically selfish of you, Ant. It’s like the Patroclea business.’
‘WHAT? How does that have anything to do with it?’
‘You love to take away things that make me happy. You’re shitting all over me, as usual.’
‘Oh, come ON. That girl was next to nothing to you. You don’t really have strong feelings for anyone, let’s face it.’ Looking into his eyes, I was surprised to find the look that smouldered under his brows: "That’s what you think.". I said weakly,
‘We could have died last time.’ His eyes were strange.
‘That’s what makes the pull so strong.’
As the evening wore on, my arguments became weaker and weaker despite the undeniable logic to them. Mark finally got my word at 10 p.m. He said that we would dive at midnight, and when I questioned this he told me that there would be no light down there anyway, which seemed a reasonable point.
As we tugged the tarpaulin away from our diving equipment on the beach, a sudden glow fell over us from the metal and glass half-hidden in the sand. As we were bathed in the softness of the dimly reflected moonlight I saw in the glimmer a look on Mark’s face that was like an angry, grinning wound, trembling like a fire and burning hot tears from his eyes. I was reminded of when we were children. Once, we had arranged a sheet between us in our bedroom and shone a torch upon it so that the shadows from the sheet were projected onto the wall. Mark danced, and I moved to his beat, knowing when he would turn, stooping and swaying in perfect harmony. I watched our projections dance on the wall, my shadow moving small and dark beneath his dim and monstrous one like two segments of a flame. Laughing, I had torn back the sheet and been frozen by the expression on his face. His eyes were immense and black, and closed like stones; and his face was rent down the middle by no child’s smile but by a terrible, inhuman leer.
We quickly donned our suits, and I turned my back to him so that he could strap on my tank; I felt a cold chill as his hands passed over me. I could still pull out; I had every reason available for doing so, but I knew that he would have gone down into the black depths without me anyway, and I could not let him do it alone. We strapped up, and started the slow walk into the shining, shivering web of the lake. The wind’s musk brought with it some powerful, unrecognisable scent that was deep and heavy, like blood: the waves lapped around me in the bitter cold like mouths filled with broken glass. Suddenly the shelf of beach fell away and I plunged into the black ether of the water. The lake glowed blue beneath me, like a great cathedral of deep shadows that stretched to the glittering ceiling of the waves vaulted over the scene.
As I marvelled at the spectacle, my brother touched my arm and we began the swim into the icy depths, our torches illumining the fracas of weeds that span below us as we approached the ghostly house. Being unable to locate the skylight from whence we had escaped the previous time, we found it necessary to begin at the front door once more. As we entered the house, I looked at Mark and he made the usual gestures but they seemed blurry in the half-light and fell unformed away into the darkness. I tried to steady myself, like a drunk, upon his shoulder, but he shrugged me off and disappeared into the hallway, his light reflected thrice more on the varnished walls and floor.
I was finding it hard to move, and I swam around the house after my brother as through a dull haze. Suddenly there appeared a man, running along the corridor before me. I swam after him, without the ability to call his name out, and then my logical senses told me that you couldn’t run in water; furthermore, he was caped. He stopped at the foot of a broken set of stairs, his back turned to me. Fearfully, I swam up to him, and put my hand on his shoulder. The torch went out, suddenly, and I panicked violently, but in the darkness a luminous face appeared, mere inches from mine. The skin was bloated, like sodden wool packed onto sharp bones, and his mouth was twisted and his lips almost fleshless. But it was the eyes that bored into me, such malevolent, dead eyes; but he was no corpse, for his mouth was moving and grinning: I saw no more, for I tore away.
Swimming fast down the corridor with my hands as feelers along the walls, I tried my torch again and found that it worked. I was in very real danger of fainting, I realised, and there seemed to be something wrong with the oxygen I was breathing. But I had to find my brother; somehow I felt him calling all through the mute and motionless house. I reached the end of the corridor and again my body froze, for there was a small man twisting terribly along the floor as some ethereal light poured down from the brown-papered ceiling. He writhed towards me; turning as if in a dream, I saw the other approaching in the narrow hall. I flung up my arms and closed my eyes; but nothing happened, and turning once more I saw the ghosts meet each other and the taller man collapse. Over his body the small man began to rise, and I saw him raise his head, and his eyes were terrible, like the dark husks of the first man. Over the walls rushed a plethora of shapes; of trees where hanged men swung, of snow cascading through the house and crushing a stooped old man, of a dozen deaths played out in mute shadow-play. Then I heard his laughter and swam again from him, rising through the house and searching for some person I half-remembered. My hallucinations overcame me and I believed that my dead mother chased me with her hands outstretched, only to dissipate as her skeletal fingers reached me.
I chased through the house as my oxygen supplies grew lower and lower, until I came to the room where what I was searching for lay, while the dancing hosts of dead spun around me like a child’s toy lantern. I pushed through the broken door, and before the hollow images of my mind floated my brother, vivid amongst the myopic forms that turned around him. I tried to move him, but his diving equipment was entangled with the skeleton of a man in a chair in the middle of the room; his torch had fallen to the floor. In my mind’s eye, I saw the skeleton not as a corpse but as the magician, grappling with my brother as a blurring twisted between them. I pulled my brother free, and then embraced him as he began to float towards the ceiling. Oblivious to my surroundings, I turned his face to mine despairingly. As his face came into my blurred vision I saw with horror that his dead eyes were blue.
For the alternate (better) ending, go to creativewriter.