The Nonesuch and Others by Brian Lumley Page B

dusky shapes, the most recognizable being that of the derelict hotel.
    Where before warm summer sunlight had come slanting through the flat roof’s ornamental gables, now there was only the glow of the hidden town’s lights…like huge three-cornered eyes, burning faintly in the night. And the longer I looked the more acute my night vision became, so that soon the hotel’s entire façade was visible to me, if only in degrees of grey and black shade. But…that feeling, that sensation, of other, perhaps inimical eyes staring at me was back, and it was persistent. I gave myself a shake, told myself to wake up, laughed at my own fancies. But then, when the chuckles had died away, I strained my eyes more yet to penetrate the night, the smoky frontage of that forsaken old place. And as before I examined its façade—or what I could see of it—from top to toe.
    First the flat roof and false gables with their background glow: ghostly but lifeless, inert. Next the face of the place: its window eyes—yet more eyes, yes, but glazed and blind—staring sightlessly out over their balconies. And three floors down the balustraded patio with its trio of guardian parasols.
    Except now they were no longer a trio, only a pair…
    I stared harder yet. On the far right, as before, that one leaned like a bowsprit or a slender figurehead over the corner of the parapet wall. At the far left its opposite number—the one with the partly collapsed canopy—continued to stand upright, but in the still of the night its torn canvas no longer flapped but simply hung there like a dislodged bandage.
    So then, maybe the third member of the watch, the one that had seemed intact, had finally fallen over, the victim of gravity or a rotted, broken pole, or both.
    But here an odd and fanciful thought. Perhaps there was a reason —albeit a hitherto subconscious one—why I imagined and likened these inanimate things to sentinels, guardians, or more properly yet guardian angels: simply that there was something about them. But what? At which point in my introspection, as my gaze continued its semi-automatic descent down the overgrown hillside’s night dark terraces, I discovered the missing parasol.
    It stood half-way down the terraces facing in my direction. Now I say “facing” because in the darkness it had taken on the looks of a basically human figure that seemed to be gazing out across the bay…or perhaps not. Perhaps it was staring down at me?
    Let me explain, because I’m pretty sure that you will know what I mean—that you will have seen and even sheltered from the sun under any number of these eight-foot-tall umbrellas in as many hotel gardens and forecourts home and abroad—and so will recognize the following description and understand what I am trying to say.
    At the apex of a parasol, its spokes are hinged on a tough wire ring threaded through a circular wooden block. Now this is a vulnerable junction of moving parts—indeed the most important part of the entire ensemble—for which reason it is protected overhead by a scalloped canvas cowl which also serves to overlap the main canopy, keeping unseasonal rains out. When the parasol is not in use and folded down, however, this cowl often looks like a small tent atop the main body of the thing.
    Now, though, with visibility limited by the dark of night, and the canvas canopy not quite fully collapsed, it looked like something else entirely and loaned the contraption this vaguely human shape. The cowl had transformed into a peaked hood, while the partly folded canopy had become a cloak or cassock, so that overall the parasol’s appearance was now that of a stylized anthropomorph: it looked “human” but to much the same degree as a snowman looks human. It could be argued, however, that the snowman looks more nearly human on account of having eyes—albeit that they’re made from lumps of coal.
    And as for my having endowed this parasol thing with sight: I think that happened when a