Even in this little Cotswold town,
where tourists swarm to browse antiques,
to sit and chat in Tea Shoppes,
gastro-pubs, and hotel restaurants —
even here the night is bleak in back streets
and in alleyways.
The dustbins overflow
with untied, lumpy
plastic bags,
and shadows shift in ways
that don’t quite match the sparse, dim lights.
The rats have little fear:
the soft and well-born cats who sit in cottage windows
while the sun is up don’t venture far in moonlight,
huddling in groups
beneath the ornamental street lamps
in the central square,
silent, watchful.
There’s a slightly shabby shop
whose maze of rooms and corridors
is stuffed with dusty books
on shelves, on tables,
piled in heaps that totter
on the floors and stairs. At the rear,
the bins are almost empty —
and perhaps that’s why the alley
is so silent in the slanted night;
even the rats steer clear.
Tonight the moon is new,
and clouds drift thinly,
veiling stars and planets intermittently.
In the bookshop, on the second floor,
there is a change —
but not a movement, more a shift of darkness
in a clump of shadows
in between twin towers of musty books.
There’s little light outside,
and what there is can’t penetrate the filthy windowpanes;
the darkness in the room, then,
should be perfect, featureless —
yet there are places
where it has a deeper quality,
and it’s in one of these the shadows shift.
There is a sound.
Again, it’s not a stirring of the air –
there’s nothing that would register
on microphones –
but if there had been listeners,
then ears would certainly have pricked
and hairs have raised on arms.
The room grows cooler,
and the scent of something sour and sickly
settles with the dust.
In the square, a solitary tourist, sleepless, strolls;
the mediæval church, the crooked house,
the buttercross on limestone stilts —
the night transforms them, even in the street lamps’
orange glare; the wrought-iron curlicues
cast complex shadows.
Now the lone insomniac
(despite the gloom, despite the dirty cobblestones)
is drawn towards the twisting, narrow sidestreets.
Though he doesn’t understand the fascination that he feels,
he doesn’t fight it; he just buttons up his jacket,
rubs his hands together, shivers.
At the bookshop,
in the second-storey room,
the patch of bitterness,
of cold, is motionless,
though as the moments pulse
it changes its position
till it’s at the window
where the grime of decades
seems by contrast
wholesome, normal, clean.
The silver sliver of the moon
cannot be seen from where
the errant tourist shuffles,
captivated by the dismal alley,
fuzzily bewildered.
Backs of businesses
loom left and right,
and there – a few yards distant – undistinguished,
indistinguishable from its neighbours,
is the bookshop. He can vaguely sense
that it’s the locus of the force
that reels him in.
The sourness of spilt milk;
the chill of mortuary slab;
at the bookshop window (though the preposition “at”
is too precise)
time and space are puzzled —
then the puzzlement is suddenly outside,
then down among
(or by, or in, or near)
the dustbins at the kerb.
The summoned tourist
and the something that is nearly
(or is less than)
nothing
meet.
There is a greasy feeling for a moment,
then the night becomes less crowded,
loses mass — the alleyway is empty,
undisturbed.
* * *
There is blood in his nostrils,
caked hard and dark.
He’s walking unsteadily
by a river, beneath trees.
The sun flickers
through palmate
leathery leaves,
occasionally blinding him;
the dazzle makes the shade seem deeper.
He doesn’t know how he came to be here.
He doesn’t know where here might be.
The trees continue.
The river continues.
He continues walking,
knows that if he falls
he’ll not get up again.
The sky, the water, and the trees
aren’t quite the colour he’d expect;
he has no sense of smell, and both his ears
seem stuffed with wax.
He doesn’t hear his footsteps,
but he feels
the crispness of the dry, dead
leaves beneath his shoes.
He’s not sure who he is,
but has a memory of darkness,
of stone cobbles, of compulsion,
something sharp
and cold,
and sudden.
He continues walking,
and the trees continue,
and the river,
and no scents or sounds.
* * *
By the back door of the bookshop,
by the bins,
the shadows shimmer indefinably,
but then are still;
the cats beneath the street lamps in the square
prick up their ears,
then yawn and stretch
and fail to meet each others’ eyes.
