The Kind Folk (29 page)

He can see nothing but cliffs and rocks and restless water. Even the road is out of sight beyond the edge of the cliff. Where may the answer to his summons come from? A depression as wide as a park bench faces a blue horizon that's pretending to be placid. Luke sits in the hollow and lays the staff beside him, and is about to bid his kind to come to him when he thinks of another call he should make. Before he can hesitate he takes out his phone and keys Sophie's number.

"Hello?" She sounds distracted but eager to talk. "Are you nearly ready to go on, Luke?"

"I'm as ready as I'll ever be," Luke says and hears a small voice declare "Folk."

"That's right, it's your daddy. He's going to make lots of people laugh."

This prompts a giggle that lurches closer. Presumably Sophie has switched her mobile to loudspeaker mode. "You like jokes, don't you?" she says.

"Folk."

"Did you hear, Luke? He said joke."

"I don't think we realise how much he knows."

"Maybe he'll surprise me while you're away. I hope you don't miss any important developments. We've been playing and we're just about to have our bath." This seems like a preamble to a goodnight until Sophie says "Is that air conditioning I can hear? It sounds just like the sea."

"That's what it is."

"Well, you give them everything you've got. Just don't catch cold if it's as fierce as it sounds."

"I won't be letting anybody down."

"And be careful how you come back to us tomorrow."

"I'll miss you both till I do."

"But don't let it stop you doing what you're best at. Say goodnight to daddy now, Maurice."

"Bye."

"Not goodbye, only goodnight. He's waving, Luke. You should see him."

Luke can, but hopes he's only imagining the shapes the toddler's hands have taken. He says goodnight and emits kissing noises before he ends the call. Pocketing the mobile, he stares around Hafan Lanwisel. The colour is draining from the sky, sinking below the horizon in pursuit of the sun. While he's been speaking, the sea has risen several inches; some of the rocks of the causeway are already underwater. Apart from the jagged antics of the waves, he can see no signs of fife. "I'm ready for you now," he calls. "Let's see you."

He hears a scraping movement below him. It puts him in mind of claws, but it's just the leathery rustle of weeds set in motion by a chill wind across the sea. He zips his padded jacket up to his throat and waits for the flutter of wind in his ears to subside. A solitary car—one of the very few he's heard since reaching the islet—passes on the cliff road, and then there's only the incessant hiss of the sea. "Don't tell me you aren't here," Luke shouts, but is that enough to bring the Folk? "If I'm your kind," he calls in some desperation, "come and prove I am."

Will he have to wait for nightfall? He could take the insidious twilight to be implying as much. A last hint of light expires above the sea, making way for the ancient glitter of stars. A pale thread is creeping across the water towards the horizon; a swollen deformed moon has risen over the cliff. When he turns away from the inland view he feels as if an unfinished face is peering over his shoulder. "You're supposed to be the children of the moon, aren't you?" he protests. "Come out and play, then."

"Girls and boys come out to play, the moon does shine as bright as day..." He seems to recall Terence singing the old nursery rhyme, but is his memory playing a trick or did Terence get some of the lines wrong? "Leave your supper and leave your street, and join your playfellows in your sleep..." Perhaps in his version the playfellows waiting in the moonlight weren't children. However nervous the recollection makes Luke, it doesn't bring him any visitors now, and singing the song aloud fails to do so. "Don't you like my shows any more?" he shouts. "You came to see enough of them. All right then, it's your turn. You put on a show for me."

A misshapen whitish pockmarked face cranes over him. Its glow lets him see that the causeway is all but submerged; just half a dozen rocks protrude above the agitated water. He glimpses the Folk leaping from foothold to foothold, extending their spindly legs to bridge gaps twenty yards wide, their lopsided bulbous pallid heads nodding on flimsy necks above scrawny embryonic bodies. Is this vision the reward Hafan Lanwisel has given him? If it's what he has to invite, he will—and then he has a thought he hopes may be inspired. "Has anybody else like me ever found out what they are?" he wonders aloud and raises his voice. "Am I the first? I'll bet at least there's been nobody else for a very long time. Don't pretend you can stay away from that. You're here."

"Here..." Perhaps the almost formless answer is merely a gust of the wind that starts the weeds scratching at the rocks below him. The sea has almost engulfed them now, leaving a band of vegetation less than a foot high to writhe above the water. Even if Luke didn't hear a chorus imitating him somewhere nearby in the dark, he's convinced he has an audience. If the unseen spectators are awaiting more of a performance, he's afraid he knows what their mute request may be. He can't refuse when it may keep Sophie and their child safe. "Here's your sign," he cries and lifts his hands to strain his fingers wide.

They won't stretch far enough. He feels bones creak and hears them too as the muscles begin to ache, but he hasn't even widened his fingers more than an ordinary human being could. Another fierce effort makes his fingers throb so much that he could believe they're being wrenched out of shape, but they don't look as if they are. He lurches to his feet and stumbles to the highest point of the islet, where he brandishes his hands at the glimmering dark all around him. His attempts to produce the magic gesture are too agonising for him to maintain any longer—and then he feels his fingers grow fluid, bending so far apart he doesn't dare to look.

While the pain is excruciating, it's somehow subsumed in his awe at the transformation. He extends his arms on each side of him as though he's preparing to embrace the dark. His hands are indistinct shapes looming at the limit of his vision. He's glad he can't see them, but he isn't seeing any response either. The cliffs tower towards the moon, which shows they're deserted. So is the narrow strip to which the tide has reduced the beach, and the sea is empty except for rags of foam and a few visible fragments of the causeway. He has given in to his own nature at last, and it has brought him no reward.

He's about to close his fists—he's praying that he can—when he's overtaken by a sense of having overlooked some detail. What's wrong with the sea between him and the beach? Has it something to do with the way to Hafan Lanwisel? He peers towards the beach and is just able to distinguish the path down the cliff. At once he sees his mistake, and his fingers twist in a spasm of panic. The rocks protruding from the water near the islet don't follow the line of the causeway, though they're close enough to it to be misperceived as part of it. The lumpy waterlogged objects aren't rocks at all, and as the waves expose what there is of their faces he sees they're watching him.

"I'm here for you," he shouts almost loud enough to lend himself courage. "I'm what you want. I've learned how to be a man and now you can take me back. I'm a man and I'm you as well."

There's only pain in his hands now. His fingers shrink together, and he lowers his shaky arms to clasp his throbbing hands against him. Surely that doesn't matter; he can still see the eyes, which are entirely black, whenever the waves reveal them. He can see that the heads haven't moved. "Take whatever you want of me," he cries, "so long as you leave my son alone. Is it a deal? Haven't I got anything you want?"

He's suddenly afraid that the answer is no, except for little Maurice. The heads are watching him expressionlessly, not least because of lacking any mouths to speak of, and nothing stirs except the waves. He's about to declare that he has no other deal to offer, but then he realises that the shapes crowding through the water towards Hafan Lanwisel aren't just waves after all. Some of the sinuous movements belong to elongated fingers. Without leaving their lairs in the water, the Folk are reaching for him.

The hands scurry like a swarm of crabs up the side of the islet, and the spindly glistening arms extend after them. When dozens of fingers find Luke they feel as cold and boneless as snails. They're more fluid, because they seep into his flesh, reminding how similar he is to them. More than one hand closes around his heart and palpates it, but this doesn't seem to be their goal; perhaps the action may even be meant as some kind of token of kinship. Fingers grope at his lungs and his innards, but most of them are aiming higher. The fingertips that manipulate his eyeballs from within make him feel like a helpless puppet, and so does the finger that invades his tongue from behind. Until they move on he expects them to force him to perform some kind of routine. But they're bound for his brain, and all the fingers cluster on his skull before oozing through the bone into the depths of his mind.

Perhaps once they're at their feast the process takes no longer than a thought, but it seems to last as long as he's lived. When they crawl out of him Luke staggers back and forth, clutching at the air with his agonised hands, almost toppling down the grassy slope into the sea. His eyes are uselessly blurred—he could imagine that a residue of the intrusive lingers has lingered in them—and his tongue is coated with a stagnant taste. Eventually his eyes focus, and his body reverts to not feeling hollowed out from within. The sea between Hafan Lanwisel and the beach is empty apart from the waves, and he knows the Folk have left him. The moon shines down on the cliffs and the seascape, but Luke feels as if the sight is too remote to grasp. He has the impression that a light has gone out of his world.

THE DANCERS

"So how are both my men?"

"Replete."

"What do you say, Maurice? Are you full up as well?"

"I'm replete too."

"Be careful saying things like that at school."

"Why, mummy? Don't you want Miss Allenby to say she can't keep up with me again?"

"We don't mind that. She was praising you. We don't want you being bullied, that's all."

"Buthlied, you mean."

"Have you been doing that routine for him, Luke?"

"I must have. When was that, Maurice?"

"When I was very little. I remember, though. And I promise I won't be bullied. I know how to make the others like me."

"Well, that's a talent to add to all the rest. Will you have another story for me to read when I'm home?"

"I'm thinking about one. I've been helping daddy. I can make another pasta sauce now."

"Don't pinch too many of our skills or there'll be nothing left of us. And you're taking care in the kitchen, aren't you?"

"Of course he is, Sophie. I'm making sure."

"I didn't mean you wouldn't. So what's your Sunday treat going to be?"

"Seeing the Arnolds, and then it can be your parents next weekend."

"Hey, Mo, whaddya know?"

"Maurice, stop it. You really do sound like big Maurice, though. All right, I'm laughing, but you need to watch out who you imitate."

"Morry, I do believe you've grown another inch at least. You'll soon be as big as my Maurice."

"Now really, stop it. Freda isn't there, though I don't suppose she'd mind. I could easily believe she was there, all the same. I wonder if you're going to follow us onto the stage."

"I've got some songs in my head I'm trying to make up."

"Honestly, is there anything you aren't going to be able to do? Just don't settle too soon on what you want to do in life. You needn't be like us."

"I want to be, and all my grandparents as well."

"You certainly know what to say to people. You mustn't think I'm saying you don't mean it, though. Now I'd better be going. I'm nearly on. Goodnight till tomorrow, Luke. Goodnight, my favourite six-year-old."

As Luke turns off the mobile, which is lying on the kitchen table that accompanied the family from the apartment downtown, his son says "Dad?"

While his blue eyes are innocently wide, his pinkish lips are playing with a smile, and he's wrinkling his long nose in the way he prefigures a joke. "Go on," says Luke.

"Who's this?" Having hummed a few bars of a jaunty tune, he adopts a patient though faintly aggrieved voice to say "Beethoven."

"It's a good job your mother can't hear you taking off her parents," Luke says, though he thinks Sophie's amusement would be less uneasy than his own. "Now what do you want to do before bedtime?"

"Please may we go for a walk?"

Luke hears him echoing Sophie's parents again, this time with the politeness Delia taught him. "Where do you suggest?"

"Somewhere new."

Luke can't help regretting that he's no longer aware which places may harbour magic. That's just one of the abilities that were taken from him that night on Hafan Lanwisel. By dawn the tide had receded far enough to leave the causeway safe to cross, but the world to which he was returning seemed flat and dull, little better than lifeless despite all the new leaves and blossoms he saw everywhere on his interminable way home.

Only Sophie and their toddler had illuminated it for him. "We'll drive," he risks proposing, "and see what we find."

He opens the front door of the large cottage while Maurice lingers in the hall. The boy is admiring some of the posters with which he insisted his parents should decorate it. Perhaps he'd grown used to the posters in the hallway of the apartment, though the family moved to the cottage before he was a year old. He wasn't much older when he surprised them by reading every poster aloud. More of them are Sophie's, along with her six album covers and her award for a million downloads of
A Song We All Can Sing,
than belong to Luke. To some extent his career has recovered from the series of uninspired performances he gave after his night on Hafan Lanwisel, even if he feels he's simply imitating the shows he used to put on, replicating his own mimicry because he has lost so much of his power of observation. Perhaps now he's too close to human to be able to stand back. "Ready for an adventure?" he calls to his son.