The first walker had not seemed to be particularly remarkable except that Ralph had immediately put him in the ’no hoper’ category. He had hair down to his shoulders, a wispy beard, vaguely Eastern clothing, ear-rings, a lip-stud and sandals but that was not what made him unusual. What was unusual was that he should be walking back toward town from this far out.
Ralph had spotted him from the window over the sink which faced the road. He had been doing his breakfast dishes or, to be more honest, his tea, supper, and breakfast dishes. That’s what Trish had liked about this house. You could see everything that passed from that window and, being remote from town, seeing passing traffic could be important. Ralph had been going to go into town himself a little later and had gone to see if the man would like a lift and maybe a cup of tea or coffee in the meantime. He assumed that the man drank tea although you could never tell with this sort. He always had a cup himself after the dishes.
But there had been no-one in sight, the road stretched straight and empty for half a kilometre in either direction and there was nowhere close by that the man could hide. He had simply vanished. And yet, Ralph was not surprised although why that should be he could not say.
From that first occasion, the foot traffic on the road had gradually increased over the following months. One or two at long intervals and then shorter and shorter intervals until the stream had become continuous. All these people hurrying down the road with increasing signs of panic. Young children among them, obviously tired, some of the being almost dragged along in an effort to speed them up, others being carried. There was nowhere that they could come from. The road was a dead- end leading only to the hydro dam and its village.
Only from the one window could these people be seen although they were not to be heard. Not a single bawling child. If Ralph went to the door or another road-facing window, they were not there. He had several times tried going out through that one window to see if the vision, or whatever it was, would remain but, even though there was no great drop involved, he always stumbled which diverted his attention momentarily and that was enough. They were gone.
The normal traffic still went up the road to the hydro village, the power house, and the lake and traffic became quite thick at the weekends. The lake was popular for boating, water-skiing, fishing, and picnics. Had the vehicles passed through the bodies of the walkers, and Ralph had taken particular notice of whether this happened, it would have revealed them to be phantoms but every time they stepped aside as though drilled.
Ralph and Trish had lived for some years in the hydro village and in others before that, he had been a shift operator, but then Trish had begun to have an irrational fear of the dam. The village had been built on the only available close flat land and that was immediately below the dam. The dam wall towering high above had become an ever present menace, the millions of tonnes of water behind it just waiting for the opportunity to burst through and destroy everything and everyone. In vain had Ralph pointed out how silly she was being. The dam had been there for nearly seventy years. It would still be there in another hundred. They had raised a family in a similar village and it hadn’t worried her then, had it?
Nothing that he could say would work so there was nothing for it. They had given up the advantages of village society and bought this ex-farm cottage several kilometres downstream. It didn’t really make them any safer. If the dam burst, the water would be on them in seconds and wash them and the cottage away but the dam wall was out of sight and that made all the difference. Ralph had had to take the car to work where once it had only been a few minutes walk. Had he been able to see the future, he would have bought in town and looked for another line of work.
Trish had always patted his tummy where it hung over his belt and told him that he needed a lot more exercise and a lot less snacks: that at his age he should be looking after his heart. And what she said was true. Yet it was Trish who had had the fatal attack and that within a month of their moving.
And since then the electricity reforms had taken effect. Now it was all about profit. The dam and powerhouse belonged to a generation and distribution company. The village had been sold, as surplus to requirements, to a developer who was intending to develop the leisure facilities at the lake. With modern telemetry, turbines could be started and stopped, alternators synchronised with the national grid, circuit breakers opened and closed from a remote location. Operators in a distant control room now controlled and monitored every aspect of every one of the company’s hydro plants. Local operators were no longer required. A maintenance crew came out from town on week days and several of them, being ex-operating staff, were on call out-of-hours in case there was anything that particularly needed on-the-spot expertise. They were required to provide their own accommodation in town.
For the rest, it had been redundancy or early retirement with a month to leave the village. The only ones remaining were Noel Jeffs and his wife Norma who were, for the moment, employed by the developer to watch the property until such time as the reconstruction work was completed and a permanent manager appointed. Noel and Ralph had been on shift together and were long-time friends and they had become closer still. Ralph and Trish’s youngest son had married the Jeff’s daughter and they had come to share three grandchildren.
In quieter moments on shift, Ralph and Noel had played cards with a deck that had become so worn that it was almost as easy to identify some cards by their backs as by their faces. That had hardly mattered. It had all been in fun and no money was involved. In retirement, the games still continued.
Previously, on Wednesday afternoons and even after the walkers had started, Ralph had played with Noel and Norma at their place in the village and had stayed for tea. Norma was of the belief that he was not eating properly now that he was on his own. The lavish meals that she provided would have had Trish believing that she was doing her best to kill him off. The hospitality of both of them overcame the depression that he always felt initially at seeing a place that had once pulsed with life and that, without realising it, he had come to love now lying so dead. On his drive up to the village, he would see no-one on the road but never-the-less had the strange feeling that the walkers were moving to the side of the road to let him past.
The games now took place at his own house. A month earlier when leaving the Jeffs with his hand on the door handle, a sudden overwhelming dread had hit him. It was not just that the scudding clouds made the dam seem to be falling. That was quite normal. Now it towered above him, somehow sentient, all-powerful and malevolent, just biding its time, waiting for the opportunity to crush the life out of him. For perhaps a minute he had been completely unmanned. He had wet himself and it was fortunate that Noel and Norma were inside and not there to see his shame. He had driven away in panic.
He could not tell the Jeffs the real reason why he could no longer come up to the village. He had sounded off at great length to Noel when Trish had had this same fear, frustrated at her seeming stupidity and at his inability to talk some sense into her. He could hardly now admit to being exactly the same, in fact much worse, no more than he could admit to the streams of imaginary people that he was seeing. They could only think that he was mad. His excuse to them had been that, with the cottage being on the market, he needed to be near the phone and available if the Estate Agent wanted to bring prospects out from town. It was a weak excuse and probably the Jeffs wondered about it, the Estate Agent had been given their number as a second contact, but they said nothing and the games shifted. Fortunately, their caretaking only required that they stay on site in the village at night and on the weekends.
Norma had never taken much part in the card play. The preparation of the evening meal had taken her time and attention. It had had to be a spectacular production rather than just plain nourishing and filling and this in spite of the fact that Ralph, embarrassed, had always protested that she shouldn’t go to so much trouble just for him. Now in his own house, it was no better. She fussed around tidying up, dusting, straightening things that already looked straight.
“For heavens sake! Sit down woman! Leave it be. I’ll do it tomorrow,” Ralph would say but she wouldn’t. The house might be man clean but it wasn’t woman clean. It wasn’t Norma clean and, if a buyer came, she was going to have the place perfect.
They played at the kitchen table with Ralph facing the window and, between giving his attention to the cards, he could see the usual parade except that lately they had become perhaps a trifle more frenetic. He had come to accept them as part of the landscape and to accept that they had not been put there to do him any harm. It was strange though to be with Noel and Norma and not have them see the solid beings that he was seeing. But he was not mad it was something else.
Then, into a game, he looked beyond Noel. He was showing his winning hand and looking at Noel in triumph. With his attention given to Noel’s chagrin, it took him a moment to realise that the road beyond the window was now bare and with that realisation came a nameless terror: the cold remoteness of shock. The cards dropped from his nerveless hands. He knew beyond doubt that whatever had been going to happen was happening right at that very instant. They must get out of there immediately. There was no time to explain even if an explanation was possible.
“Please! Please! We’ve got to get out of here. Don’t ask me why. Just come!” Noel and Norma looked at each other and in that look Ralph could see that they had previously chewed on the possibility of his having become a bit unbalanced and that his present distress only confirmed their suspicions.
“You go and we’ll follow you,” Noel said soothingly and Norma added, “Yes! We’ll follow.” But it was clear that they had no intention of doing so and that no amount of argument was going to do any good. If he survived, and he might not, he was going to lose these his closest friends.
“I’ve always loved the two of you…..and I hate to lose you.”
And with sadness he gave them both a quick hug.