The Grin of the Dark

FIFTY-ONE - TIME TO TELL

We've travelled just a few miles when I'm tempted to ask Rufus to drive me back to Windsor. Our route to London is taking us into Egham, past the park. As I glimpse the totem pole in the distance, I could imagine that the pile of wide-eyed masks is stalking over the frozen grass to match our speed. I could almost think it's craning to keep me in sight, unless one or more pallid grimacing heads have added to its stature. It's yet another of the distractions that are massing in my skull, but the thought of Mark is most insistent. What kind of fun is he having? If he's out of control I'm certain to be held responsible by his grandparents and very probably Nicholas too, but do I blame myself? Returning to Windsor isn't a solution; my presence might well aggravate any problem. Calling Natalie is unlikely to help, and I can't think of a reason to give her. I do my best to concentrate on the journey, which my overloaded brain must be rendering unreal.

I can't see the student house in Egham, but several people are dancing up the road that leads to it. They're so plump I'm amazed that they're able to dance. Of course their baggy costumes are flapping, not their flesh. The Frugoil station looks deserted, or is a grinning face flattened against the inside of the window? We're past before I can determine whether it's a poster. Beyond Staines the sky is full of lights that put me in mind of sluggish fireworks, and as the Volvo speeds alongside the airport our progress snags a take-off and does its best to drag the airliner to earth. I open my eyes to find we're miles away along the Great West Road. I don't relish this kind of instant travel, and so I try to make conversation. 'You didn't say what you thought of the film.'

Rufus and Colin keep the backs of their heads turned to me. 'Maybe we thought we couldn't improve on your performance,' says Colin.

'Give it a shot,' I urge and am immediately afraid that they'll take this the wrong way. 'I mean, give me your critical opinions.'

'I'd say he has a future,' says Colin.

'I don't see how I can disagree,' Rufus says.

I would say there's too little to disagree with. Are their comments so rudimentary because they feel I've withheld mine? I'm loath to risk trying to share them; I don't think I could cope with another helpless struggle to speak. Streetlamps make my companions' eyes gleam at me in the mirror, a glassy artificial glitter that reminds me of dolls' eyes. I find it so irrationally threatening that I squeeze my eyelids shut. When I look again we're miles ahead in the West End.

Revellers of an unsettling variety of shapes and sizes are dancing in Piccadilly Circus. A glare of light on a street sign blots out most of the letters, leaving only I ILL US. As we turn along Shaftesbury Avenue figures seem to lurch at my back in the mirror, prancing and jigging and hopping over or even onto one another. Do I glimpse an impossibly tall shape composed of dwarfish acrobats bowing towards me like a worm? Surely it's a shadow, and a shadow can't bear even a single grin. It falls behind – it doesn't spring apart and scurry in fragments along the pavement – as the Volvo inches through the crowd. If stunted figures appear to be skipping in the side streets, they must be shadows too.

I lose sight of them as we reach Charing Cross Road. As the car takes its pace from the crowds all the way to Tottenham Court Road I feel as if we're part of a procession, but in whose honour? I'm glad when the last of the merry faces stop clustering close to the windows, turning the glass and themselves pale, as the car veers across the road. A dizzy bout of swerving through the side streets brings us to the office.

The dark sky lends the brows of the attics an extra frown. Their windows glint as my publishers' eyes did in the mirror. I can still hear distant explosions and rejoicing, but the bells seem to have pealed their last. As Rufus slips his key, a plastic card from a different era than the door, into a slot I hadn't noticed beneath the brass doorknob, I say 'Watch out for the guard.'

'There's no guard here,' says Rufus.

He must mean the watchman is off duty. The door opens without a sound to reveal that the lobby is lit and deserted. Although the handwriting on the blotter that occupies much of the top of the reception desk is reversed, it looks familiar. Before I can examine it, if indeed I want to, Colin pokes the button to open the lift and reveal my face. It's decidedly too plump, though I might say the same of my companions. The mirrors on the walls insist on it while the lift quivers upwards. However hard I stare at the doors, I'm still aware of faces multiplying on both sides of me. I have to fend off the impression that a grin is spreading through them out of the dark.

As soon as the doors part I step into the low narrow corridor, which is illuminated so dimly that the source is unidentifiable. At least it doesn't seem to be relying on the skylights. I hurry down the corridor and around the corner, only to have to wait for Rufus to open 6-120 with a card, presumably not the one he used downstairs. He shoves an obstruction aside with the door and switches the light on.

There's very little in the room apart from two basic white desks, each bearing a computer and attended by a scrawny chair. Beyond the dormer window the night sky flickers with fireworks, which look oddly colourless. Rufus gestures me to precede him and Colin, then indicates the flattish object behind the door. 'That'll be you, will it?'

I grab the envelope and refrain from hugging it protectively. 'Where's the copier?'

'We use the one next door,' he says and glances at the computers. 'Everything settled at the bank?'

Is it too early for the mistake to have been fixed? In any case I can show him and Colin what I've had to suffer. 'Can I find out?'

'See your fortune,' Rufus says and turns on the left-hand computer.

I don't care for his joke, which suggests he isn't taking my situation seriously enough. As I sit behind the desk, his and Colin's faces seem to quiver. Perhaps it's a symptom of whatever condition I'm in, or the effect of the fireworks behind me. I type the address of the site for the bank and then my various secret codes. At last the page for my account reveals that I'm as much in debt as ever. 'No change,' I complain.

'Not even a penny?'

'It isn't funny, Colin. Not everything's funny.'

'You sounded like you thought it was.'

Can this be true? The memory of my own voice is already out of reach. 'I'm saying there's been no – '

My words blunder into one another as if they've fetched up against silence. A transformation is indeed overtaking the amount on the screen. My debt has just acquired an extra zero. For an irrational moment I try to joke that it's nothing, and then my skull grows fragile with realising that now I owe ten times as much. 'No, that's not right,' I protest as if whoever is responsible can hear me. 'No.'

Rufus and Colin step around either side of the desk. As they stoop to the monitor, another zero appears to greet them. Rufus is the first to laugh. 'Well, that's a new one.'

'I've not seen that before,' says Colin.

Do they think it's too absurd to take seriously? It's their job to deal with it. I don't know what sound I utter when a further pair of zeros swells my debt. They put me in mind of eyes pretending to be too blind to watch me. All the noughts might be the eyes of nothingness – and then I realise whose glee I can almost sense. 'It's him, isn't it,' I blurt. 'He's doing it. He's here.'

'Who?' says Colin.

'Where?' says Rufus.

'Don't talk like a pair of clowns. Our emeny, our ennenny. The one who's been after me ever since I started writing about Tubby.' While this isn't quite accurate, since I first wrote about him in my thesis, at least I seem to have regained control of my words. 'Let's see what he's saying now,' I shout loud enough to be heard in the next room. 'Let's see if he gives himself away.'

Rufus and Colin are watching me oddly, but how do they expect me to behave? Perhaps we can collaborate on a response to my persecutor; perhaps they can edit my post. I scrabble at the keys to log onto my Frugonet account. Is it my haste that brings up an altogether different site? In the moment before I expel it from the screen I glimpse fat naked shapes crawling slug-like over one another. In the greyish light I can't tell whether they're babies or some even more primitive life form, and they're gone before I'm sure how widely they're staring and grinning. I don't even know whether the clammy guilt that clings to me is on Rufus's behalf or my own, since my typing managed to locate the site. I try to log on fast enough to pretend I saw nothing and nobody else did.

Hundreds of emails on subjects as nonsensical as the names of their senders are waiting for me. I leave them unopened and move to the newsgroups. Too many to count have a single message for me.

Yes it is.

Perhaps the words and the message are too short to give him the scope to misspell, but I have the disconcerting notion that he has forgotten to. I glare at the screen until it begins to throb. 'What's he mean by that?' I demand.

'What do you make of it?' says Colin.

I wouldn't admit to my feelings if I hadn't been asked, but who can I trust to be sympathetic if not my friends and patrons? 'It sounds as if he's answering me, doesn't it? It sounds as if he heard what I said about him.'

Colin turns away before he speaks. 'I'll check next door.'

'You think he's there?' I whisper. 'Did you hear him?'

Colin glances back too briefly for me to read his expression. 'Check,' he says as he steps into the corridor, 'that we've got access to the copier.'

Does he think I'm being too paranoid? He hasn't been through all I have. At least he has reminded me that there's one aspect of my thoughts Smilemime can't touch – my book. As Colin's footsteps and their flapping echoes veer beyond audibility I brandish the envelope at the screen. I don't care if Rufus hears me snarl 'Try and alter this, you tubby little grurd.' I peel the parcel tape off the envelope and unpick the staples. I look up from dropping the last one with a ting like a tiny bell in the waste bin, but the other sound wasn't Colin's return, it was Rufus shifting his big feet. I slip the pages upside down out of the envelope and feel my grin rising to greet them as I turn them the other way up.

Let stalk about Ubby in Howwylud. Hiss firts flim – hiss debboo – scalled 'The Bets Messy Din'...

Perhaps I'm still wearing a kind of grin as I search the pages for even a single sentence that I remember writing. For as long as it takes me to race through the manuscript it seems my stiffened lips won't let me speak, and then I manage to force out a few basic words. 'He's been here. He's got in.'

Why isn't Rufus bothering to examine the pages? He looks as though just their presence has robbed him of speech. He widens his eyes and turns up his hands to indicate his smile, which I assume is meant to be apologetic. 'How could he have?' I demand.

Does Rufus take this for a game? He might be playing charades, the way he's jerking his hands at his smile, which seems less apologetic than impatient. His lips part, but at first simply to let his pale tongue lick them. Eventually he says 'I did my best. I'm sorry, Simon.'

However clear his words are, I find them indistinguishable from nonsense. 'What did you do?'

'I tried to stop it but I couldn't.'

He keeps lifting his hands as if he's attempting to support his expression. He isn't just smiling – he's miming a smile. The thought settles over my mind like blackened cobweb, darkness rendered substantial. 'You don't mean that,' I plead. 'You're joking.'

He shakes his head but fails to dislodge his smile. 'It's me.'

I grip the corners of the desk. I might be capable of hurling it at him, but I'm hanging onto it in the hope that it at least can be relied upon to stay solid. 'What sense does that make?'

'More than some of the things you've been going through, I should imagine.' He actually sounds self-righteous. 'You've been seeing him, haven't you?' he says with more than a hint of jealousy. 'He's been playing his tricks, or something he stirred up has.'

'Have you?' I retort in too similar a tone. 'Have you been seeing him?'

'Ever since I started looking into him after you brought him up in your thesis. I thought if I got you to research him that would distract him, lure him away. I should have known it would just make him or whatever it is stronger.'

He's apologising again. It's one more bewilderment to add to the mass that's swarming in my skull. I manage to disentangle a question that seems to have a point, at any rate until I voice it. 'Are you saying you found out things about him you didn't tell me?'

'Just a book with a couple of pages on him.' As if this justifies any secretiveness he adds 'It was about surrealism. In French.'

I can barely hear my own question. 'What did you do with it?'

'Wrote in it and sent it on its way. Don't ask me what I wrote, it made no sense to me.' Even more defensively he says 'I know I should have destroyed it but you can't, can you? You have to pass him on to other people. Anyway, we don't matter any more. There'll be no stopping him now.'

'Why not?'

'You've put him on the net. It's his ideal medium, the one he's been waiting for, or whatever he represents has. Everyone can get to him and he can get to everyone.'

'So you're telling me it was his fault,' I say savagely, 'what you did.'

'Depends what you have in mind.'

How can Rufus continue to smile? I grip the desk so fiercely that the corners feel close to piercing my hands. 'You said you couldn't stop posting that crap.'

'No, that isn't what I said.'

I do my best to fend off a sense that the past is changing – that the change is creeping up on me. 'What did you say, then?'

'That I couldn't stop you. I should have known it was no use. Everything's true on the net, and it lets anyone use a mask who wants to. It's the medium he kept talking about.'

In the midst of my massive confusion I feel it would help if Rufus accepted at least some blame. 'If you believe he's so bad for the world, why didn't you stop everyone watching his film tonight?'

'I tried, if you remember. If I'd made more of a scene they'd have wanted to know why.' He grins with some emotion as he adds 'Anyway, what for? You've made him bigger than his films. You're the authority on what he does to people. Nobody living has seen as much of him as you.'

He's blaming me again, and I sense jealousy as well. I don't know what may come of forcing him to admit to it, but I'm opening my mouth to try when words spill out almost faster than I think them. 'Mark has.'

'How can he have, Simon?' Rufus sounds as if he's attempting to calm a mental patient. 'I shouldn't think that's possible,' he says.

'He keeps watching a film of Tubby on stage. He watches it over and over.'

'Well, never mind. Soon it won't matter.'

'Won't matter?' I say through a grin that makes my jaws throb.

'No, because he'll be everywhere, or what's used him for a mask will. You've seen to that.'

His smile is no longer bothering to look apologetic. It's rising in triumph, although its inversion flickers over it. 'You have, you clown,' I yell and shove myself away from the desk. As if only my grip has been holding an image stable, the room instantly turns as black as the inside of my skull.

For altogether too long I can't tell if the room is absolutely dark – if it's flickering faintly or just my vision is. Has the sky gone out too? I'm straining to make out any detail of the room when I hear an object slither swiftly downwards to land on the carpet. It sounds flabby and plump. I stumble away from it, and at once I'm unable to judge where I am. I can hear it crawling across the floor with a noise like the dragging of a balloon full or less than full of liquid. I have to turn my back on it to locate the window, which is so dim that I might be peering at a patch of wall. When the faint rectangle stirs with a feeble pulse of light no more protracted than a heartbeat I swing around to glare at the room.

I can see very little. I'm not even sure that the dwarfish shape crouching a few feet away is the computer. All the electricity must have failed, since the computer shut down when the light did. I don't know whether the object on the floor has crawled out of the room or is biding its time close to me. I'm just able to distinguish Rufus between me and the door, but his presence isn't reassuring. It isn't just that he's standing utterly still; the silhouette of his head seems oddly lacking. 'Rufus?' I say louder than I intend.

I don't care for his response, if that's what it is. A whitish crescent seems to glimmer above his chin, but it's scarcely paler than the rest of the dim surface within the outline of his head. I edge past the desk and sidle well clear of him as I flee into the corridor.

Although it's even darker out here, I pull the door shut. Whatever was in the office besides Rufus, I hope it's trapped. I've no idea where Colin has gone, but it's Mark I have to go to, and Natalie as well. I can barely see my way; the passage looks unstable with dimness or with my nervous vision, while the doors are indistinguishable from the walls. I only just avoid colliding with the wall at the bend. I risk putting on speed towards the lift – I still feel too close to the office and its unwelcome contents – until my right foot kicks the skirting-board. I've blundered into another turn in the corridor.

There's only one between the lift and the office, and it's behind me. Have I wandered beyond the lift in the dark? I twist around to find an object looming very close to me. Surely it's just a wall, but that's disconcerting enough. Can I orient myself by the numbers on the doors? I shuffle away from the corner in the direction I was already taking and run my hand over the wall, which feels furry and chill. The fur must be the texture of the wallpaper, not mould, but I have to force myself to keep touching it. Then my fingertips encounter the smooth surface of a door, and at once I'm afraid it will jerk open, though I can't put a name to anything I dread it may release. When it doesn't budge I grope in search of the number. My fingers trace a six and another followed by more, or are they zeros? In either case there are too many; I seem to feel them multiply as if they're hatching from the door. I snatch my hand away and stagger backwards in the dark.

I expect to bump into another wall, but I'm left swaying in the midst of blackness. The lack of any sense of where I am leaves me unable to breathe. The dark and my skull are throbbing by the time I notice a point of light far down the corridor. It reminds me of a spyhole, which must be why I feel watched. What else can I do except head for the light? I lurch out of my paralysis and flounder along the corridor.

The light is more distant than seems remotely reasonable. I've no idea how far I trudge while it continues to stay unapproachable. Is it receding, luring me further into the dark? I no longer have any sense of the corridor; I could be striving to cross a lightless void. As if in response to my imagination, the source of the light begins to expand, which must mean I'm making headway. It isn't a spyhole, I see now. It's a window.

I'm supposing that it looks out onto the night when I realise that it must belong to a room, because silhouettes are peering through it. They would be nightmarishly tall if they were outside the building. Even if they're on the far side of a door I'm not sure that I want to see their faces. Perhaps my apprehension is fending off the sight, trying to preserve the illusion that they're too distant to identify. All at once, with a transition that seems to omit a considerable stretch of the corridor, I'm too close to deny what I'm seeing. I recognise everyone framed by the darkness, and the foremost is Mark.

He's at a computer keyboard. Nicholas is standing next to him, arms around his and Natalie's shoulders. The boy must be leaning towards the window, since he appears to dwarf his parents, not to mention the spectators behind them – Warren and Bebe and Joe. I can't make out the room they're in for the crowd at their backs. I suspect I could identify many if not all of those people – some belong to the Comical Companions, I'm sure, and are the girls at the very back Willie Hart's performers? – but I'm too thrown by realising that they aren't beyond a window at all. They're on the far side of a screen.

'Latterly,' I try to call to her. 'Kram, what do youth ink yawed ooing?' My struggles for coherence simply produce worse gibberish until my babbling gags on itself. Perhaps my language has run out, unless I'm silenced by the developments in front of me. Mark has used the mouse to pull a list of favourite sites onto the screen.

I've deciphered just a couple – SENOTSEMIL, DLOG FO TOP – when I'm distracted by his expression. His eyes and mouth have widened, shaping his best Tubby face yet. In a moment his entire audience, or mine, is copying him. The effort seems to inflate some of the heads in the crowd near to bursting, not least my mother's. Mark leans closer to the screen and passes his hand over his face, a gesture that reminds me of somebody much older deep in thought or a magician making a pass, and then he clicks on the name of a site. At once I'm staring through a window at tall slim houses and their writhing reflections in a canal.

I hear an eager object slither across the carpet. Before it can reach me I feel rather than hear another click all around me. I'm in a different hotel room overlooking a Christmas fairground. The slithering is closer, but a third click seems to cut it off, along with all the light. I'm enclosed by more than darkness; when I fling out my arms, wood bruises my knuckles. The impact sets hangers jangling and shakes the wardrobe. The past has finally caught up with me, or is it the future, or both? My companion hasn't far to crawl to me. I haven't time to cry out, even if I'm still capable of making any sound, before it clambers limblessly up my body and closes over my face.