The Islanders (17 page)

I hurried after him, grabbed his arm and spun him around.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ I shouted. ‘You nearly killed me!’

‘Then we’re quits, you bastard. Leave me alone!’

He pulled his arm away from me with surprising strength, and slithered on.

‘Look – what happened yesterday was an accident. That wasn’t! You attacked me!’

‘Call the policier if you have a complaint.’ He turned to look at me, and once again I saw that unremarkable but hostile face, the frosted eyebrows furrowed against the cold, the droopy moustache, the pale skin.

I grabbed hold of him again, angry and frightened, but with great ease he released himself from me and carried on up the road once more. He seemed immensely strong, for all his small build.

I brushed myself down, knocking the snow off my arms and chest. I tried to be calm, tried to put him out of my mind, but it was difficult.

I stared up the road after him, watching the way he moved. Everything about his body language evinced anger and hostility, a tightly coiled rage, compressed violently into his hunched body. I knew nothing about him except that from that moment on I resolved I would watch every step of the way when walking through the town.

Aching again from this second rough encounter, I stayed put. I watched him until he was out of sight, disappearing around a bend in the road, somewhere near the bus terminus. From the way he was waving his hands, I guessed he was still yelling at me.

Jayr said he was too busy to be bothered with Lord, so he delegated the preparatory work to me, as I had expected from the outset that he would. The great man’s arrival was not long away.

His image was already part of our daily background as Jayr had placed several of Lord’s rather ostentatious publicity photographs in the display cases by the theatre doors. I knew I had to buckle down to the task of obtaining the sheet of glass he had demanded.

My first problem was to locate somewhere that would supply plate glass of the high quality specified by him. There was nowhere at all in Omhuuv, and the businesses in the town I asked about this all told me that glass had to be specially ordered from a firm of glaziers in the neighbouring town of Ørsknes. Because I did not want to risk getting any detail wrong, I borrowed Jayr’s car and drove over to Ørsknes myself and contacted the glaziers. They were bemused by the exactitude of my requirements, but they obviously assumed it was for a shop front or window. Payment and delivery were soon arranged.

The fall of snow ceased during the night after I returned from Ørsknes.

When I was up and dressed in the morning I discovered that the long-awaited thaw had followed almost at once. The cold northeasterly wind at last dropped away, and had changed overnight into a balmy breeze from the south. For a day it seemed nothing in Omhuuv was going to change: the air trapped in the fjord had been chilled into what seemed to be a permanent freeze, and the snow in the streets and on the mountainsides was so deep, hard and solid that it felt that even a summer heatwave would never shift it. I walked the precarious streets with many of the other inhabitants of Omhuuv, still wrapped in protective clothes, sliding and skidding on the familiar frozen ruts, while a weak sun shone. But the hated north-easterly wind from the mainland was uncannily absent.

On the second day the thaw unmistakably began, with meltwater running through the streets, while the great frozen layers of impacted snow began to slide dangerously from the roofs. Seigniory workmen hurried from one building to the next, trying to control or manage the crashing of ice on to the pavements. Now at night I fell asleep to the burbling sounds of water running. There was water everywhere in the town, but most of it ran off into planned conduits leading down to the fjord.

All around the town streams and falls were appearing, and every day there were public warnings of likely avalanches in the hills above us. However winter was of course part of the normal life here, and long established avalanche barriers kept much of the danger out of the town. I was content to watch the steep mountainside I could see from my window, as it was transformed into a lacy pattern of white waterfalls.

On the third day the warm wind gave a daily rain shower, but it fell only in the late afternoons and helped speed the thaw. Every day was now a mild or even warm one, and the breeze from the south carried with it a smell that brought back to me memories of my childhood: somewhere in the warmer islands to the south of us the spring was already well established, and the wind bore scents of distant cedarwood, campion and herbs.

Jayr was more cheerful, because as the weather changed it seemed a signal of encouragement had gone out on some subconscious level. More bookings arrived with each delivery of mail or visit to the messaging service. Every morning he spent more than an hour on the theatre computer, selling and confirming seats for the long summer season ahead.

The sheet of plate glass I had ordered from the firm in Ørsknes was delivered as promised. It took the driver and his two mates, plus myself, to carry the bulky pane through the crowded backstage space and place it in the stage area. The driver gave me some padded mounts to rest it on, but it was obvious that it could not be left where it was.

After the delivery men had departed I turned on some of the stage lights and inspected the glass.

In the Lord’s specification he had noted the minimum distortion that he would accept, and I checked this with a special gauge – the glass was well within that spec. It was also exactly the right size, and the four bevelled slots where the glass was going to be attached were again absolutely correct. I checked and re-checked all the measurements, pleased at having made sure this was right. However, the bright lights revealed that the haulage of the glass, and our manhandling of it, had left several hand and finger prints, so I thoroughly cleaned and polished the sheet on both sides.

Jayr helped me move it on to the fly lines, and we slowly raised it into the rigging loft. I knew it would be secure up there, but it was discomfiting to know that the sheet of plate-glass was being held directly above the stage. It looked like a huge transparent guillotine blade, sharp, heavy and deadly.

In the town the thaw was continuing and I realized that in these early weeks of the spring the fjord became a place of great beauty and tranquillity. The mountains, which looked so barren when covered by snow, now brought forth grasses, flowers and bushes. Whitewater falls continued to course down the steep mountainsides, splashing into the dark blue waters of the fjord. The houses and shops, which looked so grim in the cold, broke out their seasonal colours: the people removed the wooden and metal shutters from windows, let their curtains blow in the breezes, hung flower baskets on the walls in the street, left their doors ajar. They painted and cleaned their houses, and tidied their gardens.

Visitors arrived, some in cars, many in buses. Shops and restaurants opened. During the days the streets of Omhuuv were crowded with pedestrians wandering around the newly re-opened boutiques and galleries, while the wharves continued their noisy work and the pungent odour of curing smoke drifted across the quays. More boats appeared on the fjord, but now they were pleasure boats, some bringing in more visitors, others simply sailing around. Two herons nested on the roof of the house I was staying in.

Inside the theatre also the seasons were changing. Our work was increasing daily, partly because bookings were now pouring in every day, and many members of the public called at the theatre with enquiries, but also because the tech crew still had not arrived. The ice cleared from the sea almost as soon as the thaw arrived, but there was some kind of visa anomaly that prevented so many people exiting the mainland at once. Because I had always lived in the calm neutrality of the islands it was too easy to forget that Faiand, the mainland country in the north closest to our part of the Archipelago, was a nation embroiled in war.

One day, shortly before our season opened I had to go to the trap room, the substage area, where one of the traps had proved to jam when I tested it. Jayr said I should try to find out what had happened – he was thinking of Lord, who was due to appear in the second week. Illusionists often needed to use a stage trapdoor, Jayr said.

The trap room in a theatre is sometimes used to store unwanted items, so out of season it can become cluttered. One of my first tasks at the
Sjøkaptein
had been to tidy up down there. By this time it was fairly easy to move around. There was little or no lighting when the theatre was not working, so I had to check the mechanism in darkness, leaning over the drive housing with a torch. The place was unheated, and cold draughts wafted against me.

My arm was down inside the housing, checking the clasps of the drive cover were tight, when I suddenly became aware of a silent presence. Somewhere near to me. It was as if something or someone had moved, dislodging air but making no sound.

I froze in position, my arm inside the machine, my shoulder and head pressing against the outer housing. I was surrounded by darkness, because I had placed the torch on the floor, the beam pointing through an access hatch close to the floor. I listened, not daring to turn my head.

The silence was complete, but the sensation of a presence was overwhelming. It was close to me, very close indeed.

Slowly, I began to slide my hand out from inside the machine, so that I could straighten and turn, look around, shine the torch about, make certain no one was there. The silence endured, but as I turned my head I became aware, on the periphery of my vision, of something white and circular, seeming to hover.

I sucked in a breath in surprise, turned fully towards it. The shape was a mask, a face, but it was horribly stylized, almost a child’s cartoon of a face. It was frozen, immobile, but in some way I cannot describe I knew it was alive.

As soon as I was looking towards it the face backed away smoothly, disappearing into the darkness almost at once. It made no sound, left no trace.

My heart was racing. I grabbed the torch, swung it around in the general direction of the apparition, but of course there was nothing to see. I stood up fully, clouting my head against the low ceiling, the under-surface of the stage. The shock of it further frightened me, so I backed quickly away, hurried to the steps, rushed up to the wings of the stage. I was trembling.

A little later, Jayr saw me.

‘I heard you making a lot of noise,’ he said. ‘Did you see something down there?’

‘Shut up, Jayr,’ I said, embarrassed at my reaction to something I had only half seen. ‘Was that you messing about in the trap room?’

‘So you did see something!’ he said. ‘Don’t let it bother you. Happens in every theatre. Sooner or later.’

The tech crew had at last received clearance from the authorities and were on their way to join us. But now the problem they faced was the multitude of ferries they had to board, the circuitous routes, the many ports of call where cargoes and mailbags were loaded and unloaded. We did not expect them to arrive until a day, or at best two days, before our opening performance.

I continued to work as hard as before, but now I had a background concern. I was worried by the sheer weight of the pane of glass we had lifted into the flies, hanging there, swinging sometimes if there was a draught of air when the scenery bay doors were opened. I quietly checked it periodically to make sure it was still secure in its harness, but other than that there was little I could do about it. Lord of Mystery was due to arrive for the second week’s show.

Two days after I saw the apparition in the trap room, I had a similar experience. Once again I was alone, and again I was in one of the more inaccessible areas of the theatre. I had climbed up to the higher of the two loges at stage left. Jayr told me there was an intermittent electrical fault. The lights in the box sometimes flickered when turned on. It was probably caused by a simple loose connection, but the loges at the
Sjøkaptein
were popular, and were booked in advance for most performances. It had to be repaired before any member of the public could be allowed in.

As usual I worked beneath a dim overhead light from high in the ceiling of the auditorium, which barely shed any illumination and none at all inside the loges. Of course to work on the wiring I had had to isolate the current, so once I was inside the loge it was completely dark.

I was on my hands and knees, working with the torch between my teeth, peeling back the carpet to expose the wiring beneath, when once again I suddenly sensed there was something close to me that had not been there before.

My first instinct was to close my mind to it, concentrate on what I was doing, hope that the feeling would pass. But an instant later I changed my mind and moved rapidly. I raised my head, sprang to my feet.

The white face-like mask was there again! This time it had appeared between the curtains that closed off the loge at the rear. I caught only a fractional glimpse of it, because once again it backed off, vanishing almost immediately.

I knew that behind the curtain was the access door to the loge, and beyond that was the upper side-corridor used by the audience as they found their way to their seats. I dived across the loge, snatched the curtains back then pushed the door open. I half-fell out into the corridor. This was a windowless part of the theatre building and Jayr and I never normally switched on lights along the corridor. I swung the torch in both directions, trying to see whatever it was that had intruded on me like that.