Chapter 2: All The Things We Don't Discuss
(part 1)
Welcome to (Re)wild Imagination, an exploration of how art can sustain hope amid climate crises, and how ordinary people can help the environment by supporting native wildlife in local areas. You are reading the paid version, which includes a serialised gothic novel.
Mr Krink was the person I ran to when I abandoned Auburn, the ancestral home of my forefathers. He was the only person I knew outside the estate. My car was one of many things that have gone missing, but that little Ford did its job: it got me to him. I met Ryan in the tailor’s shop, in Mr Krink’s shop.
It was Christmas Eve. The earth was cold and hard. The trees were dead. In that part of the world, the distance between earth and sky is skeletal. Clouds touched the ground in all places, heavy and hoary, smelling of ill intent.
The drive of Auburn is long, perhaps a mile, twisting and turning, shrouded by trees and hemmed in by bushes. Smark, the groundsman, took care of them. He culled the rats and magpies, he culled the deer. I had rather been hoping I would see him that morning but he was nowhere in sight. The gate lodge appeared deserted.
If the electricity was down that meant nobody could get in or out of the estate. This happened more than once. After the bleep, the gate sighed open, closing behind me with the creak that no amount of oil could quiet. I remember thinking how wonderful that gate was, as a child, how extraordinarily alien to everything else in Auburn. I seem to be dogged by the shrieking of metal on metal for all of my days.
Once beyond the bounds of the estate I sat a moment in the machine1, taking in the appearance of the world on my first day as a free man. I wiped the condensation from the windscreen with my mitten, and the sweat from my face. There lurked nothing unusual in the crescent of my vision. The mist was still down on the fields across from our gates.
The mouth to Auburn opens onto the back road that loops around the estate and into the village at its back. Once within the bounds of the village, the back road becomes the main road.
I avoided the way to the village, not wishing to be seen by any of the natives, striking out instead to the countryside, the desert of bog land between my home and the city.2
I had only been to the city once, and that was years before. It would be a long drive, an hour, perhaps, longer than any drive I had undertaken before. I worried about my powers of concentration.
There were no birds in the city, I'd been told once; you’d never hear their singing there.
That didn't bother me unduly. I never liked birds. I imagined the soft flesh wouldn't feel very pleasant under my fingernails.
*
My feet were loud on the gravel of the driveway as I walked from the house towards it. The front door had locked too loudly, but Auburn is a house of mumbles. I doubted that the sound travelled very far.3
My breath hung in the air.
I slammed the car door because it wouldn't catch any other way, and the rumble of the engine was like a warship in the morning. The little car always smelled of burning plastic.
I didn't care by now if I woke them. My hands were sticky with fear, and all I wanted was to get away.
While I was waiting for the radiator to work, I risked a glance over my shoulder at the house. It gaped back at me with all of its many eyes. I thumbed it a tiny wave and glimpsed a movement; Sarah my twin at her window behind the lace lifting a wrist in farewell. She was already sick by then.
*
The drive to the city took longer than expected. The roads were clogged. The heralding of the conurbation by thick smog on the horizon never happened; instead the fields slowly bled into a mess of names. The city reached out into the fields with tentacles made of schools, petrol stations and dull, brown housing estates. I was surprised by the number of abstract-style houses I spied; even in the country they seemed to have been plonked down there without any reference to the surrounding terrain, as if by an alien hand.
The sky lost its sullen whiteness as I drove south, and by the time I was winding my way through the confusion of the one-way system, it was a steely grey that seemed to wink at me.
I took this as a good omen. The first time I visited the city with my father, it had seemed a place of reflections and noise. There were no echoes, nothing for the sound to catch on. There were no birds there either, only nasty seagulls, and I'd hardly count them.
The first time I had gone to the city to be fitted for a suit for my Aunt Beatrice's funeral. Never in Auburn had there been so much sound, or so many people; Auburn was tidy and ordered and guests announced their arrival three weeks in advance. The people of the city appalled me, their proximity and numbers, their multiple variations. I had never dreamed of so much possibility for depravity and deformity. They seemed artificial to the point of subspecies. Many wore artificial hair and counterfeit nails and teeth. They were mirrors of peroxide and bone. Some had prosthetic limbs or appendages which could in no way have been natural. I clung close to my father. I was accustomed to trees and the seasonal cycle, to the call of starlings and their wheeling in autumn.
Not this, the inner Craven seemed to roar in me, not this agitation of movement and fluorescence of lights. My father, sensing a distress caressed me behind the ears and we moved on.
The door of Krink’s shop was large, made of bronze and glass, curved in a sleeper's smile. Our reflections in the glass stood side by side, mine and my father's – he already a little stooped, tall, with iron grey hair swept back from a widow's peak. He had the prominent nose and the jagged smirk of a jackdaw. I inspected the inside of my nose while my father wiped his feet.
When we entered the shop, a bell resounded in its innards. I bit my mouth at the sound. The long room was curved like the door. I had been expecting a display of some clothing but we were greeted by a narrow expanse of burnished wooden floor. We waited in the middle of the room. I remembered how careful I was to stop fidgeting, to stay absolutely still. My father pierced a glance at me. A voice from the bowel of the shop arrived before its maker. Disembodied, it quavered:
“My Lord Wren, surely?”
“Yes, Krink,” my father grinned in at the sound, basso profundo, “'tis I.” He clapped my back.
Krink moved slowly into view. I remember him then as a heron, with the stately walk of a king. The glint of his glasses came first, then his nose, then the man himself. He was dressed in a close-fitting grey suit. His feet clicked, glossy in the skin of some creature.
“The young master Wren ... surely?”
“Craven, my younger son.” My father bit out a laugh.
The shop smelt of beeswax and cashmere, and, although it was an outfitters', it displayed a very small amount of clothing.
“This is because,” my ever illuminating father informed me, “Edward Krink only makes suits to order. This establishment has been dressing the men of our name for generations.”
This made me stare at the osteal Mr Edward Krink all the more, as I privately decided that he carried his immense age very well.
Krink bent at the waist with a leisurely grace, clicking every notch of his vertebrae until he was gazing with watery grey eyes into my eight-year-old ones. He didn't blink; he didn't even seem to have eyelids.
“Are you certain it is me you are here for?” He breathed at me, so softly.
“O yes,” I said to the windscreen, fogging up again already, sweat in my eyebrows. “O yes.”
I do not remember where I abandoned my car. I had not included one-way systems or parking spaces in my escape plans. I remember the walk, however, the arduous curlicues of my first wander through the density of that strange metropolis. It bred dead ends.
At the longest last I found myself at Krink’s door.4
I arrived in nothing but my clothes and with nothing but my name and a bag. My apparel was ruined. Rain that night was impregnated with a grey sludge that I would prefer remain unidentified, but at least my name was unsullied.
The name above the door proclaimed the same establishment that I remembered. My reflection had changed, standing half a head lower than where I knew my father's crown would have been. I nodded to his phantom reflection in the doorway and stepped inside. The same bell tolled.
It was not, however, the same stately Krink to greet me. The smiling crescent room, once so bare and gleaming, was now alive with scuttling customers. The cold heron had made some changes: bright young women served the counters, and there was a cash machine that I could not recall in one corner, trilling frequently with an irresistible voice.
I hesitated in the doorway, my hands shrinking into their pockets. I had lost my rosy mittens on my wanderings and my knuckles had taken on their colouring.
Soon enough I was pounced on. I have learnt to be wary of sales assistants, but in the youth of my city life I didn't know any better.
“Hello! Welcome to Krink's! How can I help you today?”
I stared down into an elfin face at the height of my chest. The eyes were simply enormous.
I took a step back.
She blinked at me, this apparition that should have sunk under the weight of its own corneas. It was horrible. I took another step.
“Ah,” I said.
“Have you noticed we have a sale on today! Everything on this side of the room is reduced by 30 percent! Happy Christmas!”
“What about those?” I pointed at a pair of gabardine pantaloons hanging on the opposite wall.5
Her expression lightened and she relaxed into herself as if I'd relieved her of a terrible pressure.
“These?” She asked me. The question seemed to refer to more than the trousers on the wall but I couldn't quite grasp her meaning.
“Yes.” I nodded, wanting only the gabardine pantaloons and a safe passage from this den of Satan.
She fingered them as though she had never felt the texture before. Another girl dressed identically to my one, possibly even younger than my one, drifted by. My bug-eyed assistant snapped at her as one eel would at another. The child backed off, territory conceded.
My misshapen nymph beamed at me, taking the pantaloons down and holding them up.
“What size would you say you are?” She asked me. She appeared to be growing bolder with every passing moment.
“Ah?”
“Around your waist and all that?”
I looked down and back up at her. She jerked her head in the direction of the rear of the shop. Her eyes wobbled dangerously.
“Follow me,” she smiled and led the way, turning to glance behind her every now and then, as though I was her Eurydice and she would not bear to part with me. I was led into a tiny back room, little more than an alcove containing a large looking-glass and a stool. I recognised this room. I had been in it before. I stood up on the stool without prompting, glad at least that I knew how to behave in this situation, but when I looked around the sprite had dissolved into the woodwork.
Slightly discomfited, I stood my ground, hands worming their way into my pockets again. My fingers were clammy. The closet-like aspect of the room seemed to inch in on me every time I took my eyes off the walls.
I stared at the ceiling instead. It was laid out in concentric squares and I gave every appearance of studying it with interest.
“The young master Wren. Surely not?” said a voice in the doorway behind me.
I flinched, nearly toppling over but catching myself at the final moment, wheeling around with as much grace as I could muster.
Krink was utterly bald now, the light gleaming on his skull. As in those close to death, he was taking on the spectral appearance of his next state.
He beamed abominably at me, the skin stretching tight away from teeth that had already taken on the suppurated hue of the grave.
“Does your father know you are here?” He asked me.
“No. I have absconded, Mr Krink.”
The old gentleman laughed. Moths coughed from his lungs and glided away. I decided no comment was necessary.
“O young master Wren,” he panted, making me think I perhaps ought to clap him on the back, “you are simply – too much!”
“No, I tell you, I’m telling you the truth.”
He stopped laughing and inspected my reflection in the looking-glass. I saw what he was looking at and turned around in order to look at the looking-glass as well. The old man whipped a tape measure out of nowhere and began to measure my back.
“So you have fled, surely not?”
“Surely, surely,” I told him, again.
“Run away from home on Christmas Eve. You are very lucky, young master Wren, to find our doors still open on this day of all days.”
“Ah.”
“But you did. Perhaps you were supposed to find me?” He wheezed again, stepping gingerly back from me as though he didn't want to cough up on my jacket, something for which I was grateful. He wasn't such a bad old man.
“I didn't know where else to go, Mr Krink.” It was true. I didn't. Outside of Auburn I have no family of any kind. Christmas Day, I knew, would be a sad affair, just my mother and father, my sister and I, and the hounds. Christmas is a day for children and strange beings that don't exist.
“Well you were quite right, young master Wren -”
“Craven.”
He paused and cleared his throat.
“Craven. You were right, I think, in your choice. My family has loyally served your family for generations.”
“So my father informed me.”
“You have chosen a prudent safe-house.”
I smiled at him in the mirror. He didn't smile back.
“Turn please.”
I turned.
“Arm up.”
I raised my right arm up in the air. He measured the inside of my arm and down my flank.
“...What are you measuring me for?” I asked, “You know I didn't come for a suit.”
“Everybody who comes in through that door comes for a suit, Craven Wren.”
“Craven.”
“Everybody comes for a fitting, whether they know it, or like it, or want it, or not. I know what this suit is for, and the suit knows what it's for, so isn't that enough for you?”
“Will it be enough for my wallet?” I flashed what I considered to be a mischievous smile at him in the mirror, but he either didn't see it or he ignored me. He studied the bulge in my hip pocket.
“O yes. Your wallet will be happy enough, I dare say.”
I nodded at him. Surely with a mirror in the room and a conversation, one should look up from time to time to meet the fellow conversationalist's eyes? “Arm up.”
“My arm is up, Mr Krink.”
“The other one.”
“Mr Krink?”
“Yes?”
“I was wondering-” I cleared my throat.
Krink clicked his tape measure shut with a snap.
“Yes?”
“Well, perhaps what I ought to say is – that I was wondering perhaps – if – you knew of anywhere I could...lodge? For the night?”
“For the night?”
“Precisely.”
“Leaving tomorrow?”
“Indeed!" I forced out a feeble laugh. “Hopefully I can find somewhere to stay...for longer...tomorrow.”
Krink sighed, sitting down on the edge of the stool. It forced me over to the other edge, but really his legs were so thin that I needn't have bothered. He sat, hitching up his trouser-legs, exposing just enough of black, black sock and laces tied in an impossible pattern. I wondered how long it would take him to get out of his shoes each evening, and how long to get into them the next morning.
He took off his glasses with a flick of the wrist, bending his head to buff them with a cloth that appeared from nowhere.
“Craven Wren,” he muttered, “You don't know the city, I can surely see that. You walked here from quite a distance. You must have driven in – there are no trains to Auburn. You must have driven in and yet you walked for long enough to get here that it ruined your patents.”
I bowed my head, blushing.
"So that suggests you were lost?” He perched his glasses back on the bridge of bone where they belonged: “and so you expect that you can find a place to live, in a day?" He inspected his fingernails. "Oh surely not, Mr Craven Wren."
“Why did you not just say so in the first place."
“Beg pardon?”
He resumed his measurements.
Trundled is the right word for the movement of that little Ford. It reminds the casual viewer of a tumbril.
Here be monsters.
Auburn's hall is big in the old style, one wall a fireplace. It is probably the only part of the building that still stands on the original site.
Where else could I have been going?
Desperation: noun.