The Wanderer (2 page)

I leave it up to the reader, then, to decide what nature of thing
The Wanderer
really is.
⁵
Even merely taking story as
story
, there are certain thrills to be had from it, for all that its style is somewhat rebarbative. And it is my belief its depths will intrigue those with an interest in the weird. It is for these reasons I present it here.
⁶
I should warn, however, I’ve rarely been able to banish it from my brain since that second read-through and no longer often sleep easy.

Timothy J. Jarvis

A Note on the Text

Producing a ‘clean text’ from the typescript frequently required the use of software to enhance digital copies of pages, but only very rarely guesswork. Throughout, the spelling is aberrant, and this has been standardized. Obvious solecisms have also been corrected, but the many instances of tortuous syntax, left unaltered, since they do seem to be part of the design of the work. They are also an aspect of the prose which renders it very different from Peterkin’s general style; he tended to favour terse well-constructed sentences. Another way in which
The Wanderer’s
idiom differs from the one Peterkin generally wrote in, and another feature that might pose some difficultly to the reader, is the occasional use of archaic vocabulary. Underlining has been switched for italics throughout.

Prologue

Dusk is gathering, but the grey canopy overhead is breaking up, and I hope to be able to begin my labours by the light of the moon that’s soon to rise. I’m sitting on the deck of the rusting hulk I’ve made my home, a cargo freighter, named, many ages ago, exactly why or by whom I cannot guess at, the Ark, that, long since wrecked or scuttled, now moulders, canted, keel buried in the silt flats of a broad estuary, the mouth of a river known in earlier times as the Thames.

I turn to look west. In the past few years the skies have been rife with baleful hues; tonight the sunset is violet and bile. Silhouetted stark against it is the picked carcass of a vast city; its colossal edifices, sun-bleached, time-worn, scoured by dustgyres, seem monstrous tidewrack or the strewed bones of a race of giants.

The light of civilization has long since departed that place. It was once known as London: a name whose origins are lost to the roiled past; a name not merely said, but incanted, a word from a black rite; a name that must still haunt the dreams of the degenerate local tribes. Before rootlessness was forced upon me, it was my home. In the midst of its ruins, I found, preserved in a glass case, in what appeared to be a museum of antique curiosities, the typewriter on which I’m producing this account. When I recognized the letters on its keys I was overjoyed; my native tongue hasn’t been spoken for millennia, has long been dead and forgotten. Pondering this, I realize I’m not sure for whom I write. Perhaps only for myself; save the demon who stalks me, I doubt there is another living who could make sense of these words. Still, I will write as if there were: to admit there’s no one left able to read this account, aside from that devil and myself, would make the needful exertions unendurable. So, since I feel sore swollen, gravid with the spawn that is my tale, I’ll pretend; I’ll
address you often and cordially, my reader, less to ingratiate my pitiful efforts, than to evoke you by incantation. I’d also beg tolerance of my lack of facility, for my ungainly prose; I haven’t written for an age and must grope my way.

My harried and woeful immortality began millennia ago, when I was but twenty-nine years old. Since then I’ve travelled the world over. But, as the Earth, which has completed countless circuits of the sun since the things I wish to tell of occurred, always returns to the place it set out from, my wanderings, despite imponderable distances travelled, have brought me back again to the scene of the events I mean to recount.

Though I know it will be a tiresome, enervating task, I’ve decided to embark on the composition of this memoir now because I’ve become convinced, in recent years, history is drawing to a close. The tainted aether, the weird colours in the sky, is just one of a number of harbingers of the world’s demise. And, though I know I’ve placed myself in danger, it felt only meet to return here to London to set down my tale. Besides, it’s my birthplace and has been crying out to me, calling me home.

For thousands of years, I hid among the remnants of the Tibetan civilization, the impregnable Himalayas my ramparts. My life was, for the most part, that of an anchorite. Still, while other peoples I’ve encountered, suspicious of my ceaseless youth, have driven me away, the natives of that region treated me with kindness. I became adept at their language, a harsh, if poetic, tongue, punctuated by sibilance and guttural clicking, often traded goods, and twice, near crushed by accreted loneliness, spent some years living in one of their communities.

Those mountain dwellers practice beliefs recognisable as a decayed form of Buddhism and still hold with a doctrine of eternal return, which, given the many auguries of the apocalypse, would seem absurd. Though the most horrific omens – seething seas turgid with dead fish, howling dust storms, caustic rains which defoliate forests and ulcerate the skin – aren’t seen there,
there are still portents – the mountain climate has not proved impervious to change: once-freak winter thaws, which cause devastating avalanches, are now common, and the shades of the air are perhaps even more garish there than elsewhere. It would seem mere obduracy, even in that haven, to deny history is at a close and claim the principle governing existence is cyclical. The creed, though, is less foolish, I have to own, than that of the age I was born in. It held sacred, against all evidence, the notion of ineluctable advancement, for nature, for organisms, for human knowledge; I can testify history does not move towards one great goal – from time to time things start over, and it’s back to square one. But the notion perpetual return governs existence is, while less idiotic than the teleological attitude, still entirely implausible.

The main reason, I suspect, the Himalayan faith has proved tenacious, where others have faltered, is that it doesn’t require a belief in a benevolent Omnipotence – life is too cruel for such a conviction. Indeed, now the world has waxed so desolate, so quiet, it seems to me, were there a deity, or pantheon of such beings, it would be possible to hear breathing in the void. It is not, so I can only assume either the Earth has been abandoned, or void was all there ever was.

The sun sets, and the sky grows dim. Looking out over the river, I see it glows like tarnished gold still, as if it has enticed and drowned straggling rays of daylight. I watch the corpses of rats, and feral cats and dogs float past, for a moment, before the water too darkens. Night lugs its bulk into the firmament and squats there, blotting all out. Then slowly opens its myriad eyes. A short while later the moon rises – waning gibbous, bloated, wan, and mottled, sickly. But bright enough to work by, so I set up the typewriter on my makeshift desk, a piece of driftwood resting on two oil drums, pull up my chair, an actual chair, plastic, that I found in the corner of a shipping container on board this hulk, and settle down to compose this prologue.

And now I can’t put it off any longer. I prevaricate only because I’ve no desire to relive the events about which I feel bound to write. But I must now send beaters into the brakes of my brain, flush out cowering memories. These fragments I will shore against my ruins. And so I begin.

That’s the Way to Do It!

As it had been a long and tiresome day, I went for a pint in the Saracen’s Head after work. The evening was cold and the breath of the few pedestrians fogged in the air. In the pub’s grate, a fire crackled; I was glad of its warmth. A quiz programme was showing on the television in the corner of the room, sound low, but just audible. The presenter, a clean-shaven, jowly old man, wearing a suit in a sheeny fabric, fired questions at a chubby young woman hanging upside down by her ankles from a contraption that looked like something the Inquisition might have used to torture heretics. Distracted by efforts to keep the hem of her floral dress clamped between her knees, she was struggling to answer the simple riddles the gamesmaster posed. Then the image cut to a shot of an audience member: a scrawny young woman, crying with laughter. Catching sight of herself on the studio monitors she shrieked, ‘She ain’t got no knickers on!’ A close-up on the contestant’s face, now flushed, followed.

While I sat sipping my lager and gawping at the screen, a bearded old man sidled up and perched next to me, in one gnarled fist, a pewter tankard of ale, in the other, an unlit cigarette, loosely rolled, shedding tobacco all over the table-top.

‘The wolves are coming back,’ he said, in a hoarse voice, knitting his brow.

‘Ah,’ I replied, noncommittal.

‘Mark my words, they’re coming back. You can count on it.’

In those days I hated to be accosted if it was a quiet drink I sought (now, of course, I pine for company, any company), so turned, meaning to rebuff him. But this, I saw, was unnecessary; he then seemed barely aware of me, ran his fingers through his hair, stared into his glass like a crone scrying in the leaves at the bottom of a teacup. Reaching under my seat, I took the novel I was reading,
At the Mountains of Madness
,
¹
from my bag, found
my place, settled back in my chair.

I’d read six pages of the fastidious, yet overwrought prose, when I noticed an awed hush. Glancing about me, I found all gazes were fixed on the television set. The volume had been turned up, but not loud. Most of the patrons were motionless, their faces drawn and tense, though a couple of younger men at the bar mouthed, ‘Take the money,’ over and over, as if it were a petition in a litany. Looking up, I saw, on the screen, a young man standing before two plate-steel doors, supplicating the audience for help making a decision, while, at his side, the oily host grinned, rubbed his hands together.

At that instant, the reverent hush in the alehouse was broken by a loud shout. It was a colleague of mine, perhaps a little drunk, who had seen me through the open door. I turned, gestured, frantic, for her to be quiet, but she was unaware.

‘What’re you doing here?’ she called out. ‘We thought you’d gone home.’

Rapt piety disturbed, the regulars turned to glare. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the television screen; the male contestant, face twisted, bitter, was being strapped into what looked a dentist’s chair, by two lab-coated molls. I shook my head, then, pressing my lips firmly together, pointed at my mouth and raised my eyebrows. But to no avail.

‘We’re all just over the road in the Sheaves. Come on, join us.’

‘Why don’t you?’ the publican growled, from behind the teak bar. ‘Clear off.’

Abashed, I got up, crossed over to the young woman. Her name was Rachel. She took my hand in hers and looked up at me through dark lashes. Her greenish-grey eyes were startling. My chagrin waned, I bent down in mock gallantry to kiss her knuckles, was rewarded with a pert grin (when I think of that moment in these desolate surroundings, I am truly heartsick).

I followed Rachel across the street. We entered the Sheaves, a lively, noisy bar, with film and concert posters on the walls, and
speakers in every corner playing loud music. I joined my coworkers. They were sat on sofas round a long table that looked as if it had been bought at a sale of second-hand school furniture: initials and expletives written on or carved into the timber. Rachel, who’d left the gathering to get money from a cashmachine, explained to the others how she’d seen me drinking in the Saracen’s Head. I greeted everyone, and they seemed glad to have me there. They shuffled up. Rachel motioned for me to sit by her.

We drank late into the night, increasingly soused, a binge. Rachel flirted with me, sitting close enough for her thigh to brush mine. Then, after the pub closed, the gathering dispersed. I escorted Rachel to the overground rail, we walked with our fingers interlaced. At the entrance to the station we parted, and she kissed me lightly on the cheek.

I didn’t have to wait long at my stop before a bus arrived, but it broke down before getting very far, on Mildmay Park. I was tired, very drunk, had the start of a headache, and longed to be in bed, so, in spite of the chill and the driver’s vow he’d have the engine fixed in no time, I decided to walk to Highbury Corner where several routes converged. The night had got even colder and now the air was heavy with damp; the streetlamps were hazed. Then, perhaps three or four minutes after I’d alighted, the bus passed by. A couple of teenagers leant out of a window to jeer. I swore bitterly. A moment later, I saw the sight that was to curse me.