Page 61 of The Society of Unknowable Objects
“Thank you, Will,” she said. “You don’t know how much it means to me.” She pulled him into a clumsy hug over the top of the counter and he didn’t resist.
After leaving, they stood on the corner for a few minutes while James scanned up and down the street for a taxi and Henry searched for flights to JFK on her phone. Magda looked back to the shop to see Will standing in the window watching them, hands in his pockets. She thought he looked miserable and alone, and her mind immediately spun that image into another story, a tale of a man trapped in his own prison, watching the world go by with sad eyes and a heart full of fear and regret.
A Walk in the Woods
Owen Maddox was on the road, cruising through west Georgia in a rental car he had picked up at Hartsfield-Jackson airport in Atlanta. The sun was high overhead in a pale blue sky and although the highway was busy, the driving was easy, and Owen found that he was enjoying himself.
He had taken the overnight flight from London to New York the previous evening, having missed the last direct flight to Atlanta. He’d spent the night at JFK, restless in the first-class lounge, before connecting on the 6a.m.direct flight to Atlanta. And now he was on the road, heading to eastern Alabama, where the flask waited for him.
It had been five years since it had been taken from him, five years since his life had been destroyed. Five years of hunting for something he could use to beat the thief. Now that he had the chess piece the tables had turned and he would have the upper hand.
He had experimented with the chess piece during the wait at JFK. First in the lounge, where he had made a tall man punch one of the serving staff as she had passed him by. Then, at a random departure gate before his own flight, he had seen two airport police strolling by, both of them bulky with their stab vests and equipment belts. Owen had made them stop, simply freezing them on the spot for a moment asother passengers diverted around them. Then he had made the two men withdraw their handguns and hold them to their own heads. A pleasing ripple of terror had passed amongst the other passengers, screams and shrieks spreading through the departure lounge. Some people had fled; others had watched on with slack jaws. Owen had held the two men until one of them had soiled himself, a stain darkening his trousers, while the other stared with wild, panicked eyes in his frozen face. Owen had felt sure both men would have pulled their triggers if he had wished it, would have killed themselves there and then, but the thought of the likely delay to his flight that would have followed such an event had stayed his hand. In the end he had released them, letting them collapse to the floor, delirious and panicked.
Yes, the chess piece wasveryuseful.
He glanced up in the rearview mirror and realised he was smiling in anticipation of what was to come. He checked the map, spread out on the dashboard in front of him, the seemingly simple piece of paper he had taken from the man who couldn’t die in the rain-soaked darkness five years earlier. The map had been his constant companion ever since. In the last few days it had led him to the chess piece—just the sort of powerful item he needed to defeat the man—but before that he had used the map to monitor the movements of the flask.Hisflask. He had seen it—and, presumably, the man who now carried it—meander south through the United States. Sometimes it would be motionless for months on end, before moving again. The item seemed to move with no discernible pattern and Owen often imagined that strange man walking aimlessly through the vast emptiness of the United States, drinking from the flask and seeing the many secret colours of the world. Late the previous year the flask had stopped moving in the northeast corner of Alabama, a few miles north of a small town called Masters. Owen had checked every day, but the flask had seemingly come to rest.
He cruised past a road sign telling him that he was entering the great state of Alabama. He nodded to himself, his body buzzing with a cocktail of anticipation and trepidation. A short while later he slowedthe car when he spotted something else he was looking for: a gun and ammunition store, in a large warehouse located just off the highway.
***
After leaving the store an hour later he drove on for another forty-five minutes before turning off onto smaller county roads that led him through the woods to the small town of Masters. It seemed to Owen like a forgotten place, little more than two or three streets with single-storey wooden houses spaced well apart. The main street was lined with run-down redbrick buildings interspersed with overgrown empty lots. The asphalt was cracked and dotted with potholes, weeds pushing through. There was a diner on the corner of the main intersection, and a tall church built of freshly painted white wood slats. A barbershop was open farther down the street, with a bench outside that was occupied by two old men, one black, one white, both of them scowling at Owen as he drove past. Owen thought about turning back and stopping for a coffee in the diner, but he quickly dismissed that notion. He wanted to leave the town behind. It was the sort of town Owen hated, a place of misery, full of unfulfilled lives and people too ignorant to know to escape.
He followed the road north out of town, passing more dishevelled homes, warehouses, and an abandoned petrol station on the very edge of town. And then the woods swallowed the car once more. He cruised on for a few miles, checking the map until he saw that he was as close to the scribbled star—the flask—as he was going to get. He pulled onto the dusty verge and turned off the engine. It was just after midday, the sun still high in the western sky, and Owen calculated that he probably had five or six hours of daylight, more than enough time to scout out the area and then retreat to a motel for the night to plan his next steps.
“Plan first, act second,” he murmured to himself. The mantra was a comfort.
He exited the car and stood still for a moment, just listening. He could hear nothing other than the fan in the car engine winding down. Woods crowded up to the road on either side of him, sunlight dancing through the leaves. He looked at the map again. The flask was stationarya few miles northwest of where he stood. He faced that way and stared off into the trees, but there was nothing to see. He had to go in.
He grabbed the backpack that carried the box he had taken from the old man in London, as well as the pistol, the holster, and three spare clips he had bought at the gun store. He had thought about using the chess piece to steal what he needed, but this was the American South—buying a gun was way less suspicious than stealing one. He was just another guy on a day like any other, purchasing death as easily as he might buy a bag full of groceries or a tank full of gas...
God, he loved America.
He strapped on the holster and the gun, left two of the spare clips in the bag, and slid the third into his jacket pocket. Finally ready, he walked across the road, passing through a band of sunlight and feeling the warmth of the sun on his cheeks. He glanced in both directions but there were no other cars. A crow cawed from somewhere behind him, the sound scraping the silent air.
Back into the shade of the trees on the far side of the road, Owen found tightly interwoven branches and shrubs growing together in such a way as to be almost impassable. He probed and tested, walking back and forth until he found a gap that he could drag himself through on hands and knees. He pushed the rucksack through first, crawled after it, and then he was into the woods.
It was not a densely packed woodland, at least not so close to the road. Most of the trees were tall and thin and widely spaced apart, but shrubs and bushes filled the spaces in between like spiderwebs. Broken twigs and brown and gold leaf litter carpeted the ground, and shadows and sunlight shimmered with the shuffling of branches overhead.
Owen stood for a moment, just reaching out with his senses, getting a feel for the woods. Like every other woodland he had ever experienced, it was quiet, the only sounds the whisper of the wind and the swaying of the high branches. He heard nothing, not even birdsong nor the crow that had cawed at him moments before. A shiver of unease came out of nowhere and scuttled down Owen’s spine, so he pulled out the map again to distract himself. The flask hadn’t moved. It was some ways ahead through the trees. He narrowed his eyes and started forward, picking hisway carefully as thin branches scraped at his face and held him back, his feet crunching cacophonously in the silence with each step.
After a few minutes of walking he spotted an old paved road cutting through the woodland off to his right. It was overgrown and partially obscured, with grass growing like patches of stubble through cracks in its surface. A forgotten road, eaten by the woodland, probably turning off from the county road a little farther along from where Owen had parked. At one time, before the woodland had started to take it back, the road had led somewhere. Tosomething.
He kept moving, aware of the old road continuing to run parallel with his path but focussing his attention on the trees and bushes ahead of him, his ears alive to any sound, any threat. The world remained silent, just the crunching of every step he took and the whisper of the wind.
A burst of colour low to the ground caught his attention and made him pause. It was a flower growing incongruously through the brown leaf litter: a small thing, but with vibrant yellow and purple petals of different sizes and shapes, as if it was two different flowers that had somehow, awfully, mutated together. The flower flexed slightly as if caught by the breeze, even though there was no moving air so close to the ground.
The flower struck Owen as odd, out of place in the woods, but he didn’t dwell on it. He continued forward, taking note of a second flower and then a third. The fourth flower he saw was like the others but taller and with a thicker stem, and it too seemed to move as Owen approached. And then there were other flowers beyond, two or three to the left, more to the right. As Owen lifted his eyes and scanned ahead of him the flowers seemed to be growing more densely the farther he got into the woods. Not far from where he stood it appeared as if the ground became more flowers than leaf litter, a carpet of clashing colours that had been unrolled among the trees.
Owen came to a stop, resting his arm against the silvery tree trunk to study the way ahead, trying to understand what he was seeing. The flowers seemed to come in many different colours, not just the purple and yellow of the first two or three plants he had passed. They were flesh pink and bloodred, a deep green that reminded Owen of puss from aninfected wound, even colours that it didn’t seem possible for flowers to naturally display: brown and black like burnt toast, or grey blue like the flesh of a corpse. But more than the strange display of colours, Owen noticed that the flowers seemed to grow most thickly out of the sunlight, in the shadows, and he asked himself what sort of flowers preferred to avoid the light.
He noticed then how quiet the woods remained, almost as if all the creatures and insects that should have surrounded him had fallen silent. Almost as if they were no longer there.
Memories came back to him unbidden, tree roots in the darkness pulling him to the sodden earth, their grip unforgiving, and Owen swallowed, his mouth suddenly dry. He gritted his teeth and pressed on. He was not far from the flask now. He suppressed the unease that lay like fingertips on the back of his neck, ignoring the idea that the heads of the flowers, with their ugly-coloured petals, were somehowfollowinghim... turning as he passed like faces interested in his progress. No, that wasn’t happening. That was his imagination.
But the flowers were just the start of it.
Farther into the woods, with flowers brushing his shins now, Owen saw thick, ropelike vines cutting dark paths through the blooms. The backs of the vines were dotted with growths: not flowers but bulbous pustules like blown glass, in shades of spilled blood and brain matter. The growths pulsated weakly, expanding and shrinking rhythmically. Owen stared at them with wide, horrified eyes, listening to the creaking sound they made as they swelled and shrank and swelled again. He tracked one of the vines with his eyes and saw that it climbed up and curled around the wide trunk of a nearby tree, caressing or strangling it, just like the tree roots had grabbed him five years earlier.
