Nightspawn by John Banville

cried.
    ‘I said, have you seen my well? I had it dug —’
    Another blast of wind severed the sentence. A hole, not more than eighteen inches in diameter, was open in the ground behind him, ringed with a ledge of flat stones. It was down into its depths that he had been peering when I found him. I watched him, wondering if this were another trick to set me up for his mockery, but his eyes were innocent.
    ‘That’s nice,’ I said.
    He nodded complacently.
    ‘Yes, I’m fascinated by these things.’
    There was a sound behind us, and we turned. A slight, pale man in horn-rimmed spectacles stood in the doorway of the villa. He seemed ill at ease, and looked at us with an aggrieved moroseness, as though we had no right to whirl about so suddenly and catch him like that. His neat dark suit (jagged teeth of a frayed trouser cuff clenched on the back of his shoe)Struck an incongruous note against the fierce wind-blasted landscape about him.
    ‘Ah, Charles,’ said Julian. ‘This is Mr White, the writer I spoke of.’
    He turned to me.
    ‘This is Charles Knight, a fellow-countryman of mine.’
    I shook a moist warm hand, while Julian looked from one of us to the other, beaming. He said,
    ‘Charlie wanted to meet you, didn’t you, Charlie? Charlie is very interested in literature.’
    There was the faintest hint of a pause before that last word … at least, there should have been some hesitation. Charlie Knight’s blue jowls registered a further depth of gloom.
    ‘Yes,’ he moaned. ‘I’m very interested in literature.’
    He blinked slowly, sadly, behind the powerful lenses of his spectacles, and heaved a tiny sigh. His voice, vivid and thrilling as a Lancashire smog, was utterly without cadence; the voice of a weary executive contemplating the arrival of his second ulcer. I began to laugh. I could not help it. The scene was ridiculous.
    ‘Oh,’ I cried, somewhat unsteadily, to stifle the boiling glee, ‘you’re interested in literature?’
    ‘Yes.’
    He nodded slowly. A thought seemed to stir in his brain, for his left eye began to flicker, and a vein ticked in his forehead. I had a vision of him slowly falling to pieces before me, like a clockwork man gone wrong. My hilarity could not be checked. I gave a muffled sneeze of joy.
    ‘Bless you,’ Charlie murmured absently, and began to turn away. ‘You’ll be on the island for a while, I suppose, Mr White?’
    ‘Yes indeed.’
    ‘Ah.’
    I glanced at Julian. He stood a step away from us with his hands clasped on his stomach, grinning, in a rapture of delight. I thought he might wink, but instead he swung away across the garden in the wake of his friend. At the gate he halted.
    ‘Do say hello to Helena,’ he called, waving a hand toward the house.
    Then they were gone around a spur of the hill. I stood pulling at my lip, and looked into the well. The water lay ten feet down, like black shining steel. From its surface, my own eyes stared back at me, cold and unwavering, changed by depth into the eyes of some animal. What vengeful urges were stirring in that bile in the bowels of the earth? I shivered. Julian was on my mind. I had never met anyone like him before, and never will again. To be in his presence was to glimpse the infinite possibilities of laughter which the world could offer. He carried always a great cauldron of laughter trapped within him, which at intervals released little jets of merriment. Absurdity was his drug. Whether such a sense of humour was of value, or was anarchic and vicious, that I could not decide. But it occurred to me, standing by the well, that death, death indeed was the great joke which Julian sought. A massive heart attack, I decided, would be the most hilarious thing of all, and Julian would die with laughter bubbling in the blood on his lips. A very pretty notion, but unfortunately mistaken. Julian’s joke of a lifetime was something quite different from death, and I, surprise surprise, was the one who set it up for