Our Tragic Universe (50 page)

‘Thanks for asking me.’ I turned to go.

‘Use your magic,’ he said. ‘I mean, use it to solve whatever crisis there is. Use it to protect yourself if you have to.’

I remembered Robert in the forest saying that magic always had consequences.

‘There is no magic,’ I said. ‘But don’t worry; I’m sure I’ll be fine.’

The almost-full moon was coming up behind the hills. It was big, white and haunting, like the entrance to a tunnel out of the universe. I drove past Baltic Wharf to the Longmarsh car park. Totnes was where the River Dart properly became a working waterway, and although the river traffic was now mainly ferries and tourist boats, commercial ships had travelled between Totnes and Dartmouth for hundreds of years. I imagined getting into a boat and sailing home. I would go past Longmarsh on the left-hand side of the river and St Peter’s Quay on the other, as St Mary’s Church marked Totnes disappearing behind me. I’d pass the lightning-struck tree full of cormorants’ nests, and
the skeletal wreck of a condemned medical boat from the First World War. I’d glide through stretches of river as wide as lakes and held in place by damp green hills with ruins on their tops. I’d pass the oldest yew tree in Britain and the boathouse in which Agatha Christie and Max Mallowan lived while Greenway was full of American troops in the Second World War. I’d pass smugglers’ cottages and clapped-out boathouses. I’d drift past Long Wood, the steam railway, the Naval College and the Higher Ferry, and then beyond Dartmouth Castle and Kingswear Folly to the sea. I would navigate around the coast until I reached Torcross, where I could build a fire and curl up with B until the morning. But I wasn’t doing that. I was getting out of the car on my own in the dark.

I used to walk B at Longmarsh when I lived in Totnes, but she never liked going there after dark, and neither did I. I didn’t believe in ghosts, but the place still felt haunted, as if there were wrecked spirits in the air to go with the wrecked boats at the bottom of the river. Moonlight didn’t help. It made everything silvery and ethereal and the shadows it cast looked wrong, as if they were from an alternative reality. There were dim lights on the path for a hundred yards or so, and then darkness. From the car I couldn’t see anything very much. There was no sign of Vi, Frank, Kelsey Newman, Tim or the Beast. I had to get out of the car. I made myself remember a book I’d had as a child where a tiger turns up at a suburban family house. The mother feeds the tiger with all the food in the house and then the family has to go out for dinner. After this, the mother makes sure she has a tin of Tiger Food in the cupboard. The tin in the book was very impressive, much bigger than the little tins from which the Cooper cats were fed. I begged my mother to
get some Tiger Food for our cupboards, just in case, but she said it didn’t really exist. Suburbia stopped things from existing in all sorts of ways, and so I decided I would pretend that I was taking a walk there: a place where tigers could be made to sit at dinner tables and Beasts probably wore bowler hats.

I got out of the car with the torch. I coughed, and it echoed.

‘Hello?’ I called. ‘Vi?’

Nothing. I went through the gate and started walking down the path, with the black river sloshing on my right.
This is fine
, I said in a loud whisper, to cover the hollow, echoing sound of my footsteps.
Look, there’s the meadow where I played football with Josh
however many summers ago. How peculiar it looks in the dark
. I made a point of stomping along while I spoke into the darkness. I raised my voice.
Hello? Vi?
Nothing.
OK. So let’s pretend I’m a 38th-level Hermit. I have magical powers. Brilliant. OK. Remember every film I’ve ever seen and every book I’ve ever read about magic
. I clicked my fingers.
I am protected. Ha, ha. Yeah, whatever. Frank? Tim?
After I’d walked about fifty yards, and nothing bad had happened to me, I stopped talking out loud and instead told myself cheerful things in my head as the path darkened and I had to rely on my torch to see where I was going. I told myself that the dark felt womblike, and that it was better not being able to see very much because in dark like this the meadow could be full of dancing headless ghouls and I would never know. I remembered an Orb Books retreat where we’d brainstormed effective ways of conveying fear that weren’t as bland as ‘Her heart was hammering in her chest,’ or ‘His skull felt like it might explode.’ No one came up with anything to describe what my body was doing now. I ended up walking along muttering again:
Fuck,
fuck, fuck, fuck
, fuck. There wasn’t anything to be scared of, I
knew that. But I kept remembering Tim’s slightly crazed voice.
The Beast has eaten Kelsey Newman
. People had seen the Beast; it had been on the news. But any rational person wouldn’t believe in it.

After a minute or so a large shadow came towards me, and I jumped.

‘Meg?’

‘Oh, my God. Frank? I can hardly see you. You’re just a shape.’

‘Sorry. I was on my way to meet you at the car park.’

‘Where’s Vi?’

‘She’s down there on a bench with Tim. He’s a mess. We need to get him back to Totnes. Are you all right?’

‘I think so. It’s a bit creepy out here.’

‘It is a bit.’

‘There’s no Beast, is there?’

‘I don’t think so. Not now anyway.’

‘What happened to Kelsey Newman?’

‘We don’t know. Come on.’

We walked down the path until it ended. There was a patch of grass with a picnic table that in the day would offer a good view downriver. Now there were two shadows sitting at it. The shadows must have been watching us approach. One of them got up. It was Vi. She came and hugged me. The water lapped darkly at the river bank beyond the bench. In order to walk any further on this side of the river you would have to wade through water for a while. On the other side of the river you could walk a path all the way to Cornworthy.

‘Great. A torch,’ said Vi. ‘OK, Tim. Now you have to tell us: what really happened to Kelsey Newman?’

In the torchlight I could see that Tim was wrapped in a blanket and shaking. His big rucksack was a dark shape by his side. A pan-shape and a kettle-shape hung off it. He didn’t say anything.

‘Tim?’ I said. ‘What happened?’

‘You’ll think I’m crazy,’ he said. ‘Maybe I think I’m crazy. Maybe it’s the mushrooms. Maybe Kelsey Newman wasn’t even here.’

‘He was here,’ Vi said. ‘We had afternoon tea with him and then he said he was coming here. We saw him leave.’

‘How did you end up here?’ I asked Vi.

‘We just came because of Alice Oswald’s poem,’ Frank said. ‘We wanted to see as much of the River Dart as possible, and Vi thought she might find something to use in her speech.’

‘Kelsey said he was coming here too, but it was clear he wanted to come on his own,’ said Vi. ‘He had a big bag and a camera. He said he had arranged to interview Tim, so we left him to it. We had more cake and went shopping and then we walked down here. We haven’t seen him since he left the café.’

‘Tim?’ I said.

‘I told you that the Beast ate him. I told all of you that. But if you don’t want to believe me it’s up to you. I feel sick. I know whatever I say is going to sound completely mad, so I think I might just shut up now.’

‘I heard a gunshot before,’ I said. ‘Was that you?’

Tim nodded.

‘You didn’t shoot Kelsey Newman?’ I said.

‘Why would I do that? He was going to put me in his anthology. We’d already done most of the interview. Anyway, I’d never shoot anyone.’

‘Should we look for Kelsey?’ I asked Vi.

She glanced at Frank. ‘Yeah, I think so.’

‘I can’t even describe properly what happened,’ Tim said, as I started flashing the torch around behind him, into bushes and beyond them. ‘But it grew. The Beast grew from twice the size of an Alsatian into something bigger than a house. I hadn’t even seen him before today, but I was right: he had been following the river. As soon as I arrived I knew the Beast had been here too, but I thought he’d gone further down the Dart already. Anyway, I was telling Kelsey Newman about my adventure so far. He wanted to know what the Beast represented for me. What was I trying to overcome? I said the Beast was actually a Beast and I wasn’t trying to overcome anything. I told him about my book. Then, suddenly, there was this flashing light coming from behind Kelsey Newman’s head. The light turned streaky and dark: a kind of grey light or black light. I can’t really describe it. Then I realised that the Beast was standing behind Kelsey Newman, panting. His edges were blurred, but he was black with pricked ears and a long pink tongue. He looked very calm. Kelsey asked me what I was looking at, and I whispered, “The Beast is behind you.” Kelsey said, “What is it? What does it look like to you?” I said he could look for himself. Kelsey turned around. He was obviously terrified when he saw the Beast, and he told me to shoot. First I couldn’t do it. Then I tried to shoot into the air to scare him, but it made no difference. At that moment the Beast began to grow. The dark light ribboned around everything and I couldn’t see properly. The world started fading in and out, and I thought I saw black balloons in the sky. Kelsey Newman was running down the path, but by then the Beast had grown even bigger.
He just put his head down and ripped into Kelsey with his teeth. He threw him up in the air, and after he’d fallen on the ground and stopped struggling, the Beast ate him.’

‘That’s horrible,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t make that up.’

‘And you don’t believe it either,’ Tim said. ‘I can tell. It’s just like a Zeb Ross story to you. You want everything to have a nice, normal outcome. You think Kelsey’s hiding in the bushes or something.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s not like a Zeb Ross story at all, because it’s real. I think Kelsey Newman is injured, or just gone. If he thought he saw something frightening, he probably did run away. Maybe he twisted his ankle and went to casualty. There are so many logical explanations for this.’

Tim shrugged. ‘You don’t think he was injured by the Beast?’

‘No. I don’t think so. If the Beast is so violent, why didn’t it eat that woman in Dartmeet? Why did it eat all those dog biscuits and potatoes? I think the Beast is probably just a poor, lost dog having to take part in everyone’s monster fantasies. Where is the gun now?’

‘I threw it in the river.’

‘We saw him,’ said Frank. ‘That bit is true.’

‘I didn’t even want to have a gun,’ Tim said. ‘I could never shoot anything or anyone.’

Vi put her hand on Tim’s shoulder and patted it.

‘I’m not a violent person,’ Tim said. ‘Maybe I’m lost too. I really didn’t do anything bad. I just sat here not believing my own eyes.’

No one said anything for a minute.

‘What happened to the Beast?’ I said. ‘After it “ate” Kelsey Newman?’

‘He shrunk. He went back to normal. All the flashing stopped. He looked at me as if he was sorry or ashamed and then he slipped into the river and swam away. Again, you don’t have to believe any of that. Believe what you like. I’m really sorry you had to come out here, and I’m sorry about the book and …’ Tim started to cry. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Everything seems strange. I probably did imagine everything, but where did Kelsey Newman go?’

‘You’re tired,’ Vi said to Tim. ‘You’ve been out on the moors for a long time. I think we should take you to Totnes and get you in a warm bed for the night.’

‘Where did he go?’ Tim said.

‘Well, he didn’t make it to his talk at Birdwood House,’ I said.

I was in the car with Vi and Frank. We’d taken Tim to their B&B and arranged for him to take over their room. We hadn’t told the landlady very much, just that Tim felt a bit ill and might need to see a doctor in the morning. We paid the bill and then I drove back down the Lanes towards the sea. Vi and Frank were going to stay with me in Seashell Cottage. It seemed like the most sensible plan.

In the car Vi told me in more detail about what had happened that afternoon. She and Frank had gone for afternoon tea with Kelsey Newman in a café by the river. Vi had been intending to really have it out with him about the quote and tell him everything that was wrong with his theories. But as soon as she’d told him about the quote, and how out of context it was, he got out his BlackBerry and rang his publisher to tell them
to change it. He was on the phone to them for ages and then apologised and insisted on paying for tea.