The Pilgrims

4

The working day ahead loomed like one of three big unwelcome hills between Eric Albright and the weekend. The saving grace of the modern age was that it was socially acceptable to spend that weekend playing computer games in your underwear, inhaling pizza, with or without a sixpack open on the desk beside you, at age twenty-five and beyond. The extended adolescence, some called it. He called it therapy.

For now Eric played grown-up and dressed in business shirt, slacks, tie and polished black shoes. Following the career path of Clark Kent, he was a journalist for NSx, a ‘cool’ newspaper geared to twenty- to thirty-year-olds, distributed free throughout the city (and slowly going broke). That Eric had held his job so long was a mystery just recently and unpleasantly solved. He’d become aware that he was a sort of cult attraction for the paper’s readers, as his fifty-word entries for lost dogs or the odd sports report and restaurant review (when a real food critic couldn’t be found) were always far too emotional and involved. Fan mail had been sent to the editor, something they’d tried to keep hidden from him. It was both novel and deeply worrying: in the trade he’d staked his dreams on, writing, it was his inability, not his ability, that had kept him employed while heads rolled all around him.

It had not been deliberate: the people calling to report lost dogs had actually made him sad. He cringed with embarrassment, thinking back to what they’d published in his name: Our dear friend Rexie, part Scottish Terrier, part cattle dog. Last seen Brickworks Ave. We’re lost without your simple little joys. Furious wagging tail to welcome us home. Even the bad: barking, holes in the yard. Don’t be afraid. You will chase your ball again. Help us! Rexie, come back.

The fan mail described him as ‘hilarious’ and ‘a trip’. How then were his novels going to fare? The printed pages were scattered across his bedroom floor where they’d been flung in despair. One was a murder mystery, with ghost story parts thrown in (the ghost did it). The others were about superheroes he’d invented. One was named Death Row, a former convict who’d escaped and seen the light, and now fought crime via magic powers resembling methods of execution: lethal injection, electric chair, hangman’s rope, so on. Perhaps it was all uproariously funny …

He hesitated before locking the flat’s front door behind him, very tempted to call in sick. How was he supposed to submit articles knowing they were being read by people trying not to laugh until he’d left the room? Worse, how was he supposed to be funny on purpose, now he knew that was what they wanted?

His polished shoes beat down on the old concrete regular as clockwork, tap tap tap, carrying him towards an air-conditioned room in a tall building in the city’s inner peaks. More pleasant-looking than handsome, he was slim with straight blond hair falling in a cropped wave, bright eyes and a soft mouth with a slight overbite. Seeing himself stride across the glass of store windows, he did not think a stranger’s eye would pick him out from the street’s background of normality; but if it did, its owner would be unable to imagine him as anything other than office worker. Nor, to his horror, could he. He wore not a suit, but himself, and suddenly knew he could never take it off. If he slipped into a phone booth, he’d leave it buck naked, to jeers and pointing fingers.

He hadn’t realised how badly this business at the paper had affected him. The very concrete underfoot seemed to slip and shake. It was as if he’d caught a mirror’s reflection from an angle never seen before, and was now unable to look away.

The street dipped and curved. At its end was a bridge, with a bike path underneath running through a wide shadowy tunnel, opened like a yawning mouth. The bridge overhead clattered with the ungodly sound of a train, howling its way across with another load of Erics and Ms Erics, young and old, towards their own air-conditioned rooms in tall buildings, where, like the Eric passing below them, they did this or that with paper, computers, calculators, pens, phones, headsets, coffee cups, and all the rest. He fancied he saw their faces in the passing windows, each one identical to his own.

Beyond the bridge was a seedy old park you didn’t want to walk through at night, where slept a seedy old drunk Eric occasionally played chess with.

Below the bridge the mostly brick wall was thick with colourful graffiti slapped on with deft skill, almost pleasing to the eye but not quite, thanks to the tangled black scrawl across it saying MINE in street code. In the part of the wall that seemed always to be in shadow, there was something Eric’s peripheries sometimes caught on, something he felt (without ever really reflecting on it) to be an odd addition to the paintwork. It was a small red door made of little wooden planks. Black spraypainted tags had made their way like cracks across the boards.

What he hadn’t noticed until now was that the wood was real. The door was real. Not a painting, as he had always assumed; no, someone had built it into the wall, or stuck it on somehow. Why?

The tap tap tap of his footsteps paused as he looked more closely. This red door — about the height of his shoulder and just a bit wider than him — had been so much part of the background that it was a bit of a jolt to see it right here before him now, despite its having been there all the while. It had been there the whole time, he assumed …

He reached out and flicked the wood with his fingernail, just to make sure his eyes had got it right. They had. It was … well, it was a door. It had a keyhole, and a small handle — more a copper groove for the fingers to fit under, to pull. An odd decoration for the wall, but surely nothing more; nothing on the other side but the old bricks of the train bridge, cool to the touch.

Surely nothing more …

So he kept walking, and could not later have said just what made him pause, turn and look back. But when he did, he sucked in a sharp breath and dropped his briefcase. It opened as it fell, spreading papers over his feet. His lunch orange rolled sideways along the ground into a puddle of filth. Just for a moment there’d been a glimpse of movement, a glimmer of light at the keyhole.

He crouched before the door, then shrieked and fell back. Looking back through the keyhole for just a second was an eye. That glimmer of light? It had been like daylight, when the owner of the eye shifted away.

Now the keyhole was as it had been before: dark, nothing but brick behind it. He scrambled back to his briefcase, hands shaking a little as he put it back together. The orange he left in the gutter. And, though shaken, he kept walking, and the day panned out just as he’d dreaded it would, till it was time to go home, and things — for good or ill — began to change.

‘Here’s young Eric Albright, late home from work.’ Whoever spoke was lost in the shadows under the train bridge. The cleaners’ vacuums had woken Eric at his desk around nine. The voice was of course familiar.

‘Well, if it isn’t Stuart Casey,’ said Eric.

Casey, or Case, moved into that wedge of the path revealed by the street light. He might as well have stepped out of a costume shop having just dressed in its most convincingly generic-old-drunken-man garb: battered hat, fingerless gloves, ragged shirt and mismatched jacket and trousers sitting loosely. Case’s unsteady footsteps sprayed little stones across the concrete path, indicating he’d put away at least one bottle since noon.

‘You’re looking well,’ said Eric. Case laughed uproariously, and Eric joined in. They both knew he looked like shit.

‘How’re you looking, then?’ said Case. ‘Eh? Saw you this morning, checking out my wall. You dropped your briefcase all over the place. Something scared you pretty good, eh? What was it, a ghost? Maybe a naked woman with wings?’

‘Naked woman with wings!’ said Eric, pretending not to be unnerved by the mention of ghosts. ‘Where’d you get that?’

‘I seen one myself. No lie. She flew right through from under here, night before last. Pretty as a diamond, she was. Glittered like one too. I’d put a few away, but I saw her all right.’ Eric was surprised by how straight-faced and earnest Case sounded. The old man sighed a long breath reeking of cask wine. ‘How bout a game?’ he said.

The cheap plastic chess board was already set up not far from the door. Eric had played him on maybe a dozen occasions, often when Case was too drunk to stand up, and had never once beaten the old guy. He had twice forced a draw, but that was all. ‘Nah, not tonight.’

‘Why not? Still scared of the wall? The door?’

Eric didn’t like the glint in Case’s eye. ‘What about the door?’ he said.

‘You tell me,’ said Case. ‘What about it? What’d you see?’

‘Why do you want to know?’

‘Why don’t you want to tell?’

This would go on for some time, Eric realised. He shrugged and kept on along the path.

‘You think I’m joking about that woman, don’t you?’ Case called after him. ‘Does this look like I’m joking?’ He dug around in his pants and held up a black pistol.

‘What the hell are you doing with that?’ said Eric. ‘Where’d you get it?’

‘Never you mind where I got it. I’m here keeping watch. That door — something’s going on, and you know it. You saw something. Well, so did I. I heard something too. It’s making noises down here at night. Has done for a week or two.’

‘Noises? Like what?’

‘You tell me, I’ll tell you.’

‘Fine,’ said Eric. ‘An eye. OK? I thought I saw an eye at the keyhole.’

Case made a strangled noise. He staggered forwards and grabbed Eric’s sleeve. ‘You wait here with me tonight. OK? We’ll stand guard, you and me. Something’s gonna happen, I can feel it. It’s your chance to see something no one else ever has, you bet. We’ll keep watch. OK?’

This was possibly a very elaborate scheme via which a lonely old man hoped to garner a little companionship. It was so ambitious Eric almost felt duty-bound to oblige him, at least for half an hour or so. He sighed and crouched with his back to the graffiti-clad wall. ‘Fine, let’s play.’

And just as they finished their third game, and Eric began to say his goodbyes, white light bloomed into the tunnel of the train bridge, beaming through the keyhole of the door.