Once upon a time there was traveller who had to go on a very important journey. A long journey, and a complicated journey. He had to cross oceans and motorways and forests and airports and rivers and time zones. And somehow, he got lost.
He came to a country that he didn’t recognise and hadn’t meant to be in and, worst of all, couldn’t find a way out of. A strange country. A very old country. The buildings were old, almost all the people were old, the roads were potholed and the roofs of the hotels and government buildings and hospitals and schools all leaked. And it rained all the time. Like the weather had just given up trying to be nice to people.
It was a country with a long history, mostly of wars. There were statues everywhere of old men in white stone with cold, white eyes staring down and memorials to all the people who had been killed in the wars. For some reason, the people were proud of this. They loved to remember that they had killed people and that people had been killed. The memory of death was everywhere.
The traveller tried to get away but he couldn’t. He had to slosh through puddles on pavements to go to official offices where he met officers, but there was a protocol which didn’t count any more and a treaty that had been broken. Day after day he went to the offices and got nowhere. And while he was doing that, he noticed that the country was actually getting smaller every day. Shops closed down for a few days and then just disappeared and the street they were on got shorter and nobody could tell him why. People were happy to talk to him but they never listened to him. They were always answering questions he had never asked and so their replies were useless. And always the rain behind what they were saying and the white, dead, unmoving statues.
The only way he could find out what was happening was by going to the pub and buying a glass of very nice beer and sitting in the corner and listening to the old people in the pub talking to each other. Gradually what he was hearing enabled him to figure out some of the strange things that were going on. It sounded like the country was actually haunted. The old people round the fire shook the rainwater from their clothes, and when they had had three or four beers all talked about ghosts and what they had to do because of the ghosts. Whoever was sitting round the fire with a glass in their hand as the clock got close to midnight and as the rain continued to fall in the darkness, would start to talk about the ghosts and what should be done and had to be done. The long history brought obligations, brought the debt of war; the money destroyed but still real, demanding a decent return.
In all the time he’d been in the country he hadn’t seen any ghosts. He looked and looked; looked when woke up early, when he was tired, when it was midnight, after midnight, at sunset and sunrise, through the constant rain, when he was sober and when he was drunk. And though everyone talked about the ghosts he never heard anyone say ‘Look, there’s one,’ or saw anyone stare in an unexplained way across a room at where a ghost might be.
And then he heard them talk about ‘The Quarter’ and ‘the end of The Quarter’. He thought The Quarter must be a place, maybe the place where all the ghosts lived, but then it sounded more like The Quarter was a day or a time of year, because everything had to be ready for The Quarter. And one evening it became clear to him that the end of The Quarter would happen the very next day. At midnight in the big town square.
The next evening, just before midnight, the traveller put on his thickest coat, turned up his collar and ventured out through the pouring rain to the town square. He found the doorway of a closed shop that he could stand in and watch what happened. It was a dark night and the lamps round the square were shining a dim, wet yellow. At first the square was empty, but it gradually began to fill up with people talking quietly to each other and gathering round the edges of the square. It seemed to the traveller that as more people gathered, the streetlamps became brighter. More and more people came and soon the square was crowded, apart from a large space in the middle, and the streetlamps were shining so brightly it was more like a bright summer morning than a dark winter’s night.
And then the whole crowd became silent, as if their voices had suddenly been cut off. The quiet was so powerful, it was a breath-taking silence, and the traveller realised that the silence was so deep because the rain had stopped. Not one raindrop pattered on to the pavement in front of him.
The silence lasted only a few seconds and then there was a loud BANG and a flash and a ravel of thick smoke in the middle of the square. It cleared like it had been sucked into nothing and behind it was a big, black box standing in the middle of the square, the size of a double decker bus or a furniture van or a shipping container. But completely black and still.
The streetlamps shone even more brightly than before; so brightly that all the colours disappeared and everything was black and white. And the hairs on the traveller’s arms started to bristle as if a ghost had just passed by or was approaching.
And then a door in the middle of the black box opened and two figures stepped out. They were men, but men who seemed to be made of gold. Gold men who looked like the Oscar statuette, with gold arms and hands and heads and black, empty eyes. The gold reflected the brightness of the streetlamps so brightly that you couldn’t look at them.
The two men stood either side of the door from which a bright blue light poured. And now someone else came out of the door; a woman. But the ghost of a woman. A dead woman with a message that somehow still lived.
She was an old woman, but she was dressed like an airline stewardess with a bright blue suit. Her skin was grey, her face was grey and her hair was iron grey and set into a shape like a bubble of stern words round her head. She had a piercing nose and a piercing voice and she cried out to the crowd. ‘There is no alternative. Now is the time to rejoice. Now we must pray and give thanks to those who went before us who preserve and protect us. Now is the time to offer what is owed to them, to propitiate them.’
As she was speaking a shape like an airship or a space ship or a flying, floating penthouse gradually took shape in the night sky above the square, glittering with lights. And, as she spoke grey shapes of men, old men in dismal, grey suits, floated silently down from the airship to the ground where they vanished just like bubbles blown by a child or snowflakes on a sunny winter’s day.
‘See!’ pierced the woman. ‘They are still with us. Those who went before. Those who died in our wars. Those who gave us their wise words. Those who built our country and what it is made of. And see above us, their home, the craft of the Virgin Besus that has explored places no-one here will ever go, where there is absolutely nothing, not even air, in their sacred quest for life beyond life. Now we give thanks to them. Let the sacrifices begin.’
As she was speaking the gold men had been at work in the square. They had set up a crystal sided tank with steps up to it, steps down into it, steps up out of it and steps down and into the black box. And they were filling it with water and ice.
‘Bring forward those chosen!’ skewered the woman.
The traveller could hardly believe it. Lines of people, all wretched looking, were shuffling forward. They were being pushed by the crowd, though it seemed a little reluctantly, and there were people who looked like stewards who were shepherding them slowly forward shouting ‘Steer Calmer! Steer Calmer!’ One by one, they walked up the steps, down into the icy water until it was over their heads, then up, dripping, soaked and their life steaming out of them and down into the box. As they entered the box a beam of light appeared, at first faintly but then more strongly the more of the people that entered, between the box and the ship in the sky.
They were old people mostly, but not all. Many were children. There were so many the traveller started to count them. The first people to enter looked like refugees. The traveller counted 31 of them in a few minutes before he was interrupted by the voice of the woman bullying the air again. ‘We offer them to you; the spirits of Goober and Ugle and the Sugar Mountain Boy.’
She carried on and so did the queue of victims. These now looked more like homeless people. The traveller tried to concentrate on his counting. He got up to 688 before he lost count. They went into the ice tank and their hair and clothes floated up to the surface and their faces were patched blue with ice as they came out. Still the woman hammered nails of words into the air. ‘To the Blonde Johnson, Prince of Pork Pies in his Bony Lair. We beg for your benefit and your care. To IDC Organ for knowing that the world goes round. To Pee Bee for your burning oceans.’
And now the saddest part of the parade – old people, people in poor clothes who already looked like they could die of the cold any second. They were feeble and had to be helped by the gold men through the water. Of these he counted three hundred. And still they kept coming. People clutching filled in forms that had been torn into pieces, people who couldn’t look round them for worry and fear, people insisting to the crowd that wouldn’t listen that they had the right to remain among them. Hundreds, hundreds, maybe thousands. Nobody but the traveller was bothering to count and he had to stop. He imagined what if this was happening around the world. Suppose the airship visited city after city and country after country in turn. How many would be taken through the icy water? He tried to calculate. A child every ten seconds. 3.1 million children a year.
More wretched and destitute people kept coming, but the traveller couldn’t watch. Instead, he was looking at the people round him. They looked tired. They looked like they didn’t understand what was going on but couldn’t imagine anything else. They all looked like they wanted to be somewhere else. They looked defeated. Meanwhile the blue woman was still drilling the air calling on ‘Fletnix the Everpresent! Ego the Husky Melon and his Lightning Charger!’
So, then he looked at the air ship. Maybe it was a trick of the light but the ship seemed lower than before. It seemed to be almost level with the roof of a tall building on the opposite side of the square. A building with a leaking roof and a scaffold tower against its side. A scaffold tower that it might be possible to climb up and from which it might even be possible to get onto or into the ship. So, the traveller edged his way to the back of the crowd who were still watching and listening to the feeding of the ghosts. Then he ran, dodging through back streets and alleyways until he was on the other side of the square and clambering up the scaffold, level by level. He got to the top and could see the side of the ship right next to him, but too far to jump. Or close enough to jump? He could no longer stand the procession of people through the icy water or the scraping of the ghost woman’s voice. He jumped.
His hands slapped hard against the ship. He tried to grip but couldn’t grip. He fell backwards, down, head over heels. He fell through the beam of light. Blinded, he blacked out.
After a time that seemed at one and the same time a very long time and no time at all, he woke.
The wind and rain outside. It was called Storm Arwen, he remembered. Not anything else. Where did all that come from? He had been reading as he fell asleep, poems by Alan Bold. The lines in Buchenwald he remembered; We turn away. We always do. It’s what we turn into that matters.
