Confused, Masters began crying as the carriages dissolved around him and tumbled away through the night sky, the foundations of his life evaporating as he fought to recall anything at all that made him human.
What was it about this area, what did it possess to make it so special, so irreplaceable and precious? A few roads, a pond behind a wall where sticklebacks were trapped in jars and dragonflies skimmed the oily water, a railway line with a narrow pedestrian tunnel beneath it, a station of nicotine-coloured wood and rows of green tin lamps along the platform. Some odd shops; a perpetually deserted furniture showroom, damp and dark, its proprietor standing ever-hopefully at the door, a model railway centre, a tobacconist selling sweets from large jars, a rack of Ellisdons jokes on a stand, none of them living up to their packet descriptions, a chemist with apothecary bottles filled with coloured water and a scale machine, green and chrome with a wicker weighing basket, a bakery window filled with pink and white sugar mice, iced rounds, meringues and Battenburg cake. An advertisement painted on a wall, for varnish remover of some kind, depicting a housewife happily pouring boiling water from a kettle on to a shiny dining room table. Cinema posters under wire. A hardware shop with tin baths hanging either side of the door.
This confluence of roads and railway lines is bordered by an iron bridge and an embankment filled with white trumpet-flowered vines, and populated by families with forgotten children's names; Laurence, Percy, Pauline, Albert, Wendy, Sidney. No ambitions and aspirations here, just the stillness of summer, the faint drone of insects, bees landing on flowerbeds in the police station garden, tortoises and chickens sheltering from the heat beneath bushes, cats asleep in shop windows with yellow acetate sunscreens, and life being lived, a dull, sensible kind of life, unfolding like a flower, the day loosening as slowly as a clock spring – an implacable state which children thought would never change, but which is now lost so totally, so far beyond reach that it might have occurred before Isis ruled the Nile.
The lecturer had no memories of his own because he did not truly exist. Just like any flesh and blood human being, the creation that was Harold Masters reached his time unexpectedly and without resolution, and so dissolved into a tumble of threadbare tissues. With no plot momentum to drive him and no memories of his own, just borrowings from the mind of his creator, he turned over and over into nothing and was gone. And in that moment, he was the most real.
The storyteller in the mind's eye of Harold Masters sits at his chipped writing desk staring up at shelves of books, his eye alighting on an old 78 rpm record, and it dawns on him that he took Masters' name from the label, which features a dog and a gramophone. He wonders how many other characters' names came from spines of books and recollections of friends. A video of Brief Encounter, a copy of Dracula, a photograph of New York, a lottery ticket, a drawing of a phoenix, a brandy bottle, a hotel brochure, a dog's collar, an Arsenal scarf, childhood notes. He looks for the patterns that shape his own life and finds only tarmac, concrete and steel, the dead carapace of something lost to all but his mind's eye.
His own past is as dead as his – and Masters' – recollection of it. Dr Beeching closed the branch lines, road planners cut the streets in half, smashed down the houses, constructed swathes of concrete through the hills, the roads, the railways, the gardens, and like a bush cut through at the root, everything familiar died. The shops of his childhood were boarded up, homes falling to the wrecking ball, friends divided, families relocated. Now oil-drenched vibrations pulse the once-still air. A bright patch of pavement remains where once he stood with his face to the sun, free as the sky.
That was his reality.
Everything now is fiction.
They feel different, he notes, fact and fantasy. The former rooted in observation and experience, the latter bound by publishers' conventions. Sitting in the small cold study, the storyteller determines to leave behind his outmoded world of locked-room mysteries and vampire soaps in search of something real. But how hard will it be to leave such a cosy niche for a place with endless horizons and no perameters? Even letting go has a learning process.
He pushes back his chair and goes to the open window, inventing as hard and as fast as he can. It is a beautiful spring morning, and the breeze causes his eyelids to flutter. There is brine in the air. He looks down from the window-ledge at the thin white clouds racing far beneath, then loosens his belt and steps out of his trousers. It only takes a moment to remove his T-shirt, pants and socks. Drawing a deep breath, he walks confidently out on to the rope-covered surface of the springboard, determined not to show that he is scared.
How the releasing of shackles makes his body feel lighter than air.
Poor old Harold Masters, not being allowed to finish his story. It was so obvious to see where his tale was going that there was simply no reason for the author to finish it himself, not when his readers could put together the clues and do the job for him. The burden is always on the author to rediscover ways of surprising his audience, and that task has been fulfilled, albeit in a rather unorthodox manner.
It's good to be standing at the edge, he tells himself, bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet. There's a new world ahead. As the old century closes, he can leave behind his plots and characters. There are some excellent practitioners of the art who seem more than happy to close up the store behind him. There will always be the attraction of lies.
His body is pale and unused to such exposure. The clouds below appear as if seen from an airplane window. He moves further to the end of the board and gives a few experimental bounces. Then he bends his knees, jumps into the air, comes down on to the board and straightens his legs. The tension released in the board springs him high into the air, so high he feels he could punch a hole in the sky. For a brief moment it seems as if he could stay like this forever.
And for those who are left back on the ground, blinking in the sharp sunlight, those who are all too familiar with where they have been, the question for them now is how not to look back, how not to look down, but where to begin.
Where to begin.
And the answer, of course, is right – here.
Christopher Fowler
Christopher Fowler, one of Britain's most highly regarded horror writers, is the author of eighteen published books, including the bestselling Roofworld, Rune, Spanky, Psychoville and Disturbia, as well as numerous screenplays and collections of short stories. He lives and works in London, where he runs The Creative Partnership, a Soho film promotion company.
