Loofah's jacket was now stiff, cold and heavy with damp; it felt like part of an old suit of armour, weighing him down, but failing to provide even a modicum of warmth. Indeed, the drizzle had permeated everything with its wetness, plastering lank spikes of hair over his chilled scalp, and coagulating into dribbles of water that ran down his cheeks and cut paths of transient clearness across the misted lenses of his spectacles. The mud was coming over his ankles now, each step a loathsome plunge into a cold wet mouth that sucked obscenely at his lifeless feet. As he walked he examined his numb hand: blue-grey flesh, dead and gangrenous, draped in the silver shroud of slime, a memento of the hard rubbery body that had curled between his fingers like a living fruit after he had picked it off the stile.
A slug, thought Loofah, why be afraid of a harmless little slug? He shrugged, struggling for nonchalance—but his recent strange thoughts had left their own glistening slime that clung to the inside of his skull, haunting and ominous.
The oppressive grey light pressed down, crushing colour, suffocating all warmth. The path was narrower here, a little canal of mire winding between banks of dead undergrowth. Wet mud slithered down the sides of his feet and wriggled between his numb toes like super-cooled earthworms, and brittle black twigs reached out to scratch at the leather of his jacket, like the desiccated claws of long-dead birds.
He stopped to listen.
Silence. Absolute and dead—the silence of the grave.
Silence and stillness—for nothing moved except for the white clouds that poured through his nostrils at each breath and then hung in the air, vapour corpses sinking slowly to earth in a mist of drizzle.
He was alone. Glancing quickly around, he shuddered, the cold fluid of anxiety flooding his veins. Normally he didn't mind being alone—not here though, not here as the only living thing in the wood of the dead, not here where strange thoughts clung like wet slime.
His chattering teeth snapped at the white breath as he exhaled and he hugged at his body, searching in vain for some last vestige of warmth. As he looked down over his sodden summer clothes, he thought again of Dentressangle, snug in oilskin, boots and gloves. A hot spurt of honey-sweet self-pity brought momentary comfort—here was he, left to freeze in the dead woods, dressed for July while everyone else was well wrapped up against the January cold.
Well, maybe not everyone. There was, of course, another who was equally inadequately garbed.
Loofah shuddered, as he always did when the familiar image slithered into his mind: the thinning hair and silly spectacles, the jacket, the tee-shirt, and the ridiculous little shoes. Dentressangle's baleful words now crept through his grey matter like tiny parasite larvae: 'one becomes two'. Their meaning was clear: the other was indeed of his flesh, part of him. Loofah's guts squirmed.
He noticed a bird sitting on a twisted branch close to the path. A blackbird, it was crouching down with feathers ruffled against the cold—so there was at least one other life in all this deadness.
The amoeba now swam inside his head—it was in the process of dividing. This time, however, the two parts did not separate, but remained bound together by a thread of protoplasm. And this time the halves were not identical; one was bright and clear, its organelles pulsing with life, whilst the other was dark and dead. The bright daughter was struggling to complete the division, writhing frantically in its efforts to free itself. But without success—the dark twin, like a pedunculated tumour, remained firmly attached.
And then, with slow and sinister menace, the dead jelly began to move, pulling itself along the umbilicus that still joined them. The living daughter thrashed desperately against the unbreakable cord, but its fate was sealed—its deadly companion closed around to engulf it, devouring its brightness, consuming its life. As he shivered with horror, Loofah inadvertently brushed against the twigs of the blackbird's branch—and, pivoting on lifeless claws, the bird fell forward and tumbled to the ground, crumbling into a pile of dried skin, spicule bones, dust and feathers.
Loofah hurried past this scene of death that had so successfully mimicked life. Now he could feel the other behind him, all around him—inside him. Yes, he could even sense his presence inside his own skull, inside his own soul, the other's foulness blending with his goodness, polluting him.
A dead rabbit stared up at him from the leaf mould with eyes massive and blind, swollen by disease. Its orange fur was blackened and eaten away over green-dark flesh, deserted now even by the maggots. He had no right even to exist, the other one, he was a no more than a bad copy imitating Loofah's life, a malignant tapeworm sucking at his soul, devouring his very being.
Loofah was walking faster now, panting hard, the depraved mud sucking at his panic-driven feet. An image swirled through the drizzle—the same bespectacled face, but with pallid flesh and white-pupilled eyes, black lips in a twisted grin. He had come to drink his blood, come to suck the life out of him. Tiny rivulets of ice-water ran down his face and into the fake fur of his jacket collar. Loofah shivered while cold tendrils of angst coiled around his trembling bowels. The air was gravid with wetness.
Ahead of him, just off the path, he saw a wall, a crumbling brick wall, old as Methuselah. Leaning against the wall was an inverted triangle of folded black cloth, with a handle of curved bamboo. An abandoned umbrella, it was a shield to hide him from the threatening rain, from the cold, and from the darkness inside—and from the other one, as he swept down through the black trees, arms spread, dead fingers clawing the air, a vampire thirsting for life—for his life.
Loofah reached the wall but as he grasped the umbrella handle it gripped him back, sharp claws digging into cold-numb flesh, and then burst open like a dark flower, spreading black leather wings across his face. Unalloyed terror shrieked through his skull as he jerked back, cowering against the wall—and suddenly there were hundreds of them, glaring animal eyes under radar ears, flashing splinter teeth, leather wings beating frantically against his face. He slid down the wall, covering his head with his arms, amid a whirling maelstrom of flapping leather and tiny hate-filled faces.
Bats with baby faces in the violet light, each face the same. They were inside him now, inside his skull, inside his soul. A scream, rushing up from the depths of his being, ripped through him in a torrent of glittering eyes and grinning mouths, shattering the world.
And then there was silence—total black silence. He was alone now, truly alone, a single isolated entity of pure, pulsing fear.
Something small and soft penetrated the blackness, pressing his thigh. Then the silence made a noise: a snuffling, sniffing sound, very close. He felt warm wetness on his cheek and lifted a tentative eyelid. A huge face was pushing under his shielding arm—white and cheerful with red floppy ears tumbling out from under an orange sou-wester, its vast pink mouth was panting out white clouds of dog breath and licking at his cheek with a steaming tongue. Opening both eyes, Loofah lowered his arms.
He was crouching in a patch of muddy leaf mould beside an old brick wall, with an excited little Cavalier King Charles spaniel jumping up at him and wagging her tail with unmitigated joy. As well as the comical sou-wester, the dog wore a lime green plastic cape that enveloped her like a tea-cosy, and four tiny orange Wellingtons, one on each paw.
Where once there was death, now there was life. The memory of howling demons in his skull was suddenly far away and he smiled, reaching out and ruffling the damp fur of the dog's ears.
'Hello again!' she said, and then she was off, scampering over to join her identically dressed sister who was sniffing around a nearby birch trunk.
Loofah stood unsteadily, stiff from his crouching. The two little dogs scuttled around, heads down, enthusiastically quartering the muddy ground. Life after death: the irrepressible good cheer of his two new friends was like warm anti-freeze poured over the icy fingers that had so recently been probing at the very core of his being.
But then he felt a brand new icicle, hidden in the warm words of her greeting. The spreading smile froze on his face.
'"Again"?' he said, addressing the dog who had greeted him, 'What do you mean—"hello again"?'
She paused from her sniffing and looked up. 'Why, we've met before. Don't you remember?'
'Have we?' he asked dubiously.
'In Bottom Wood,' she said, 'We were with Mrs Antrobus, our owner.'
At that moment a switch in his memory bank clicked into place and a circuit hummed into life. 'Of course!' he cried with relief, 'You were in your school uniforms then, weren't you?'
'You do remember!'
'I'm so sorry, you must think me very rude for not recognising you. But to be frank I thought you were confusing me with someone else. You see, there is somebody who looks quite like me—very like me, in fact—well, the same, actually. And sometimes people think that he's me and that I'm him.'
'Dear, dear,' said the dog, 'That must be very annoying.'
'It is, really. Because he's not a very nice person, not very nice at all.'
The second dog had now also stopped her site exploration activities and they stood side by side in their matching rain-wear, looking up at him.
'Oh, that's terrible,' said the first dog, 'But we would never confuse nice Mr The Seeker with anyone else, would we Cissy?'
'Why, of course not, Elspeth. After all, there could only ever be one Mr The Seeker.'
Only one Seeker: the words diffused across his mind like healing balm.
'Oh yes,' said Elspeth, 'and we've met them both.'
A jagged fragment of ice jabbed through his dura mater.
'You've met—him?' he winced, 'The one who looks like me?'
'Oh no,' said Cissy, 'not the one you were talking about.'
'Not the nasty one.'
'No, no, no—we've not met him.'
'It's only you that we've met,' said Elspeth, with finality.
'Oh,' said Loofah, 'But I thought you just said—?'
'And both of you are so pleasant,' said Cissy.
'Not a bit wicked.'
'A perfect gentleman…'
'The pair of you.'
He looked at from one dog to the other while they looked up at him, their two tails wagging like metronomes. In the mixing bowl of his skull, dread and relief swirled together in a confusing blend.
'It's very cold for the time of year, isn't it?' he said eventually, with a shiver, 'And I think it looks like rain.'
'Oh, don't worry,' said Cissy, 'It'll soon brighten up.'
'You think so?'
'Oh yes!' piped Elspeth, 'It always does, doesn't it?'
And then, far away across the woods, a whistle blew and a strong female voice echoed faintly in the cold-heavy air, calling to heel her wandering charges.
In fact, the rain began in earnest almost as soon as the dogs had gone. Still, whatever their meteorological skills, they were lovely little animals: so friendly, so polite, and ever so nice about him. About him and—: the thought stumbled awkwardly to a halt. His numb feet were sinking into the cold slime at every step, with rivulets of icy water running up the back of his neck. 'Perfect gentlemen', he repeated in his head with slow deliberation, forcing the words through one at a time, 'the pair of you'. The amoeba, still dividing, was spinning gently in its primordial soup—this time, however, both daughters were identical, both pulsed with the same protozoan life. Loofah was still shivering uncontrollably and all his extremities were long-lost to sensation—but somehow it seemed to bother him less now than before.
The downpour was soon well and truly into its stride—wave after wave of tiny splashes swirled across the coalescing network of puddles that comprised the path, while cobweb shrouds of rain, like the diaphanous veils of some invisible erotic dancer, were being draped across the drop-dappled mud, before being pulled gently upwards through the birch trunks, and away into the slate-grey slab of the sky. Several little rivulets were now trickling up each of the lenses of Loofah's spectacles, bending and blurring the woods as though crudely made bottles were rotating in front of his eyes.
Quite suddenly, there was a face and he stopped dead, convulsing inside. It was the face from before the wall: white skin, dead eyes, and grinning, blood-hungry lips. He wanted to scream and look away—but somehow managed not to, and instead stared steadily ahead, meeting the dead eyes with his own.
It was then that he saw his mistake and the realisation broke over him in a warm wave. For the face was that of a person not a ghoul. Indeed he now saw that it was his own face—the results of some quirk of refraction by his water-blurred lenses against the drifting sheets of rain. He held up his hand and the unsteady image did the same, showing an ordinary man's hand—not a claw—with its palm towards him. Then, as the strange illusion began to dissolve into the greyness, Loofah laughed out loud.
Soon all that was left in his field of vision was the blurred woodland, the pools of watery mud, and the back of his still upheld hand, with a steady spatter of raindrops on the chilled, blue skin. It was then that he first noticed, somewhat absently, that the rain was not behaving as he had assumed it would be—for all across his hand, tiny rivulets were trickling up the knuckles and fingers, forming themselves quickly into droplets, before jumping dramatically up into the air. When he then examined the sleeve of his jacket, he saw that water was seeping out of the wet suede, and in the same manner was forming itself into raindrops and springing away. Indeed, as he peered out across the wood through the still rather blurred spectacle lenses, he could make out swirls of droplets leaping from the surface of the mud-puddled path like millions of translucent salmon, and rivulets trickling up the twigs and branches of the nearest undergrowth before taking to the air, tiny liquid fledglings flying to join the great flocks of rain that rose steadily up into the sky. After half a minute's puzzling, Loofah shrugged to himself: he didn't remember rain behaving like this, but then—unlike most of his countrymen—he had only ever taken the most superficial interest in the weather and so perhaps he was mistaken.
Somewhat later, he noticed that the walking was becoming gradually easier. The rain was still going up heavily and the mud, though still deep, was less wet. Loofah's jacket began to feel lighter and his tee-shirt was slowly drying out as rivulets of water trickled up his neck and away into the sky. It was warmer too and the first tinglings of sensation were pushing out along his forearms and down his shins, counter-attacking troops fighting to reoccupy the previously abandoned territories of his hands and feet. There was more life in this part of the woods—tiny buds covered the wet, black twigs of the trees and here and there on the woodland floor were scattered patches of snow-drops, gaily drying in the rain.
Something caught his eye to the left of the path. It was a rabbit hobbling on a stick, its belly shaved and criss-crossed with an interlocking pattern of suture lines. It was weak, but it was alive, presumably convalescing while drying its bright blue fur in the rain. A few yards deeper in the woods he saw that the two lagomorph paramedics were helping another invalid—two black wings strapped either side of a prosthetic body in pink plastic, which were struggling to flap together, learning to fly again as one bird.
Loofah smiled—life snatched from the jaws of death. As he turned back to the path, there was another flash of blue in the undergrowth far ahead. This time it was bluebells, a small clump caught in a fleeting patch of sunlight that had managed to peep through the thinning clouds.