Compulsory Games

by Robert Aickman

  Crickmay understood that there was an interviewing sub- committee. It had been set up before he came on the scene and appeared to enjoy the unqualified trust of everyone. It would have been early days indeed for Crickmay to test what self-assertion with a sub-committee might achieve. A sub-committee was almost certainly more self-contained still.

  In consequence of this, Crickmay never really saw Rogerson, the man he had all but created. It seemed unusual, in these times, that Rogerson’s Christian names should be Ezekiel Joshua John, but Crickmay would not have been surprised if the interviewing subcommittee had set that positively to the man’s credit, as evidence of forefatherly moral ballast. When Crickmay had asked how old the man was, the sub-committee chairman had answered with a smile, “As old as the rest of us,” just as if Crickmay had not been one of them.

  But of course the crucial point had been the subtle changes in the whole Committee’s policy which, under Mr. Toller’s guidance, had accompanied the new appointment. Though the cemetery was not yet quite full, Mr. Toller had hinted that the moment had come for the Council to bluff it out. “De minimis non curat lex,” as Mr. Toller had not failed to point out; and since the county, or possibly some authority higher still, would in any case have to do something very soon, they might just as well accept the fading torch now, and thus quite probably save money in the end, especially when so many of the defaulting ratepayers were pleading bankruptcy. In much the same spirit, the Cemetery Committee had pre-empted the final decision of the Council as a whole, by ordering, on its own exclusive authority, that the cemetery gate be finally closed, and the notice-board taken down and stored.

  Rogerson thus entered upon a domain entirely of the dead. Of course he had never for one moment claimed skills to compete with those refined through so many years by Mr. Yarwood. Rogerson was quite willing to accept that he would be little more than a half-pay caretaker. He entirely understood that free accommodation in The Lodge would reasonably account for much of the remuneration that might otherwise go with the job. Even when the boys hurled concrete rubble against his leaded windows, Rogerson merely hid beneath the small but heavy table. They could actually see him doing it. When the boys climbed in to look for ghosts, his huge face could be seen looking back at them, though much higher up than Mr. Yarwood’s face; and provided, of course, that there was enough light, moonlight or some other kind, and that there had not been any mistake in identification by such light.

  The truth was that from the moment the cemetery finally closed, the local mythology began to mutate. Also, of course, a new generation was insidiously emerging in the area, despite the deflated number of parents. A cemetery that is open for most of the daylight hours on most of the days in the year, including most Sunday afternoons, is a very different place from a cemetery that is closed until the Day of Judgement. The number of persons interested dwindles as the place becomes overgrown, but a handful become fierier than ever, and they find recruits among kindred spirits far and wide. Some become devotees, who would never have cared one way or the other as long as the place was regularly accessible within the law. Overall, a more exalted and dedicated spirit comes to the fore when every ingress has to resemble a raid. It was true that Rogerson apparently saw all or most that was going on and seemed to do nothing; but, though at first this had led to licence and casualness among the invaders, it resulted later in mass avoidance of The Lodge and its area, even more avoidance than in Mr. Yarwood’s time, and without a word being spoken. Rogerson seemed so much less predictable even than his predecessor.

  A place where a boy has followed to the grave his own grandmother, after her many years of suffering upstairs, is one thing. A place where no boy has ever known a single person in the life is very much another. It is one thing to contemplate meeting Ben Whitehead after his disgraceful death in his little truck. It is something quite different when a boy has no idea what a ghost looks like. School pictures of Costume Down the Ages contribute virtually nothing. The nameless horror begins to come into its own. Such as the deceased Mr. Yarwood become ghouls without boundaries.

  Tony Leverett had not again visited Crickmay’s flat. Formerly, he had dropped in quite frequently for a Scotch and even a cigar. Crickmay always kept a few cigars under lock and key for certain prospective customers. Now more than two years had passed with no sight of Tony. He was a keen voluntary worker for the divisional organisation; but Crickmay did not know what other occupations he had. He had spoken once or twice of a fiancée. Perhaps he was now married, and unable to go out very much.

  Maurice Cheale, however, took a small initiative; and timed it admirably, as one would expect of him.

  “Would you care to look in at the Chairman’s room during the break? I should be glad to have a word with you, Oswald.”

  Cheale called by his Christian name every Council member of both parties or of none. In some cases, it had been quite difficult for his personal secretary to ascertain what the Christian name was, or at least the name used in the peace of the man’s unofficial life.

  Crickmay could only speculate upon where he had gone wrong, but, when he tapped at the door, Cheale said “Do come in,” and said it in the friendliest way, and immediately offered him a quite comfortable armchair.

  “I forget whether you smoke?” The solid silver cigarette box bore an inscription in square letters from a group of grateful ratepayers.

  Crickmay shook his head. “Only sometimes with my customers.”

  “How’s business?”

  Crickmay shook his head. “Not too bright, I’m afraid.”

  “Why not stock more paperbacks? With you know what on the cover?”

  Crickmay shook his head a third time. “I’m a dealer, Mr. Cheale. Not a retail stationer.”

  “Maurice, if you don’t mind.”

  “Sorry, Maurice.”

  “Nothing to be sorry for, Oswald, dear boy. I don’t read much myself. Simply haven’t the time. Who has nowadays? But you know what people are.”

  Crickmay nodded.

  “Why should I try to teach you your own business?” Cheale looked guardedly genial. “That’s not what you’re here for, is it? All I want to do is to reassure you.” Cheale began to fiddle about in the cigarette box. His hands always shook slightly. “Something quite different, wouldn’t you say?”

  Crickmay nodded again. Cheale flashed an enormous lighter, like a flame-thrower, which seemed not to work very well. Even though it too was in solid silver, it was unable to sustain the flame for more than a second or two.

  “Oh, curse,” said Cheale at last. “Got a match, Oswald?”

  Crickmay shook his head. “I’m not a regular smoker, remember.”

  “Well then, I shall have to do without, and doubtless be all the better for it. You’re quite right to smoke only when on business.”

  Crickmay took note that his interview was not to be regarded as business.

  “What I wanted to say was simply this,” said Cheale. “Just this. Be patient. Don’t fret and worry.”

  He had laid the unlighted cigarette on the municipal calendar, crowded with engagements, and studio photographs. His mind was plainly on the question of how soon he could escape and find a light. On the other hand, the business with Crickmay was not important enough to justify asking him to wait while Cheale searched the building.

  Crickmay nodded. It was advice he had often been given, starting with his Uncle Hubert, who had visited the Crickmays at least once a year for such purposes.

  “I know you must sometimes feel you’re not making much progress,” continued Cheale, “but there are periods in life when the best thing a man can do is simply to stay put and wait upon events. The more senior committees are naturally filled with more senior men, and a certain time has to pass. Time is on your side, Oswald. You’ve got it to give. Don’t forget that, and keep your chin up. I can promise you very sincerely that my eye is on you quite often, and that the same goes for several others. I’ve asked you in for a moment in order to te
ll you that.”

  “It’s very good of you to bother,” said Crickmay.

  “Keep soldiering. That’s what we all have to do in our different ways. It’s what public life is and should be. Service. That sounds like sentiment, but it’s the truth.”

  Outside, Crickmay managed to ingulf a cup of coffee concentrate and a local government bun before returning to the Chamber.

  •

  In the cemetery, as the years passed, the vegetation tangled, the rats proliferated amazingly, the dogs howled, the headstones cracked, flaked, and disappeared. Large, mysterious crevices opened up, in the ground, in masonry; and, from vaults, skeleton hands crept out, protruded a while, and then dropped off or were snapped off. The air smelt of corpses, of vermin, and of mould. All that the general public saw of Rogerson was a round red glow in winter through his filthy window, as if he were an alchemist.

  It seemed very cold in and around the cemetery, possibly owing to the neglected and soggy state of the ground. Assuredly for much of the year there was a mist more often than not; through which the boys caught fleeting glimpses of Count Dracula and the Will-o’-the-Wisp, which Murch used to insist was only marsh gas. At warmer seasons, however, the cemetery was virtually impossible. “You’d have to take your gas mask,” as the boys put it. Not that a mist was always absent from the cemetery even in summer: a putrescent vapour, odorous, rancid; pervasive, to say the least.

  The heavy green railings that held the whole place together, the pride of the borough when they had been first erected, were rusting, parting, bowing, sagging.

  It seemed easy to enter now; but interior exploration had become almost impossible away from the beaten tracks. The tracks themselves had to be rebeaten at more and more frequent intervals, or they too would have relapsed to almost untraversible wilderness. For much of the way, the tracks were, in any case, mere tunnels through the always half-rotten vegetation; lighted only by the red eyes of motionless or scuttling rats, the green eyes of hostile serpents, such gleams as might reach so far from the tunnel ends, and the cold fingers of small electric torches, always failing and disappointing their once-proud owners, after the tiny but accomplished shop-lift.

  At the best, one had to go with care: there were fresh holes opening up all the time, numerous soft places, long displaced grave-kerbs to stumble on, entangling briars and suckers, some of the latter thick as coffin ropes. Often there were sights which to the squeamish were repellent; and unpredictable even to the philosophical.

  The tabu upon the region round Rogerson’s abode steadily intensified year by year. One could go anywhere else in the cemetery—at a price—but not there. In any case, The Lodge was fast coming apart at the seams, as anyone could see by looking at its frontage upon the street, next to the gate that no longer ever opened, and was probably unopenable. The mothers had often watched Mr. Yarwood doing his chores or his shopping, and pitied him for the loss, all that while ago, of Mrs. Yarwood. Some of the purchases he made could not be accounted for, but eccentricity was deemed to be a sufficient answer. On the whole, the mothers came to accept Mr. Yarwood and his ways. But not even they ever saw Rogerson in a shop.

  Foxes began to feed in the cemetery: smelling more pungently because they fed mainly on offal; all the more sly and elusive from the modification of their environment.

  Naturally, the boys claimed that wolves were there too, but it was a claim for which others demanded proof. For example, the night howling, which sometimes rose and fell for hours on end, winter or summer, could have been the dogs; which everyone admitted to be there, and indeed could be seen by all who passed. The ragged beasts used to dart out, do their business around the pavement furniture, and dart in again. People complained to the Council about the nuisance created, and then pestered the Citizens’ Advice Bureau and other mediatory bodies.

  The tale of the cemetery spread, until, in the end, parties of young people were coming from quite distant regions and estates in order to play there. Inevitably, rival gangs gestated; which fought it out among the broken tombs, in the thick squelchy jungle, with none of the inhibitions sustained by more trim environments. Boys who were unhappy at home began to camp in the cemetery, hidden from all; but it was noticed that few stayed for very long, probably none, though it was hard to be sure. Similarly, the more systematic sleepers-out, those who made a profession of it, never seemed to take to the place, even though it might have accommodated a legion of them, and in almost ideally impregnable surroundings. Quite often, none the less, the boys found smashed syringes, methylated spirit bottles with liquid still in them, and discarded garments: “coats and hats,” as they themselves put it. Sometimes there was even doubt as to whether the human remains one knocked against had come from sleepers beneath the ground or upon it.

  The Romish shrine, once the only significant design feature on the gently sloping ground, had disappeared long ago. The Honorary Secretary of the local Preservation Society proved to be unaware that it had ever existed when an enquirer showed him a black and white picture postcard of it and invited him to comment. It had become impossible to say when last the shrine had been noticed. None of the boys ever appears to have tumbled upon the holy marble statuary, in whatever state of degeneration. Conceivably, the total structure had been miraculously translated, as in their time were the Holy House, and so many other edifices. The two little chapels had gone, too. At the best of times, there had been little demand for them, though it had been necessary to build them, in case there should be. It would have been quite uneconomic to provide heat for them also.

  The potting shed had resolved into its component parts years ago. From time to time in the locality one would come upon the tarred planks shoring up outhouses, or imprisoning rabbits.

  It should not for one moment be supposed that the meetings of the Cemetery Committee had in any way terminated. Mr. Toller, having secured his main objective, the closing of the cemetery to the public, which had taken two and a half solid years of negotiation to achieve, had proposed that thenceforth the committee meetings cease to be monthly and become quarterly. Had this step not been taken, Crickmay would quite probably have managed to resign on some plea of business necessity, whatever Cheale might say or do; but, as it was, it hardly seemed worth while to cause trouble. The constant meetings of the whole Council mattered less to Crickmay: on the one hand, they were less nerve-racking, in that it hardly mattered whether one could identify the other councillors or not; on the other, attendance, being far less conspicuous, was thereby far more optional.

  When it came to the Cemetery Committee, however, new problems had arisen which required close application, and soon the meetings had to be made bi-monthly.

  One such problem was demands by relatives for access through the padlocked gates to the tombs of their dear ones.

  For a considerable time, this could be dealt with by long delays in delivering replies of any kind to written communications, accompanied by a standard response to telephone calls (let alone to callers in person) to the effect that, as the cemetery was now finally closed, all enquiries must be in writing. The central factor, as Mr. Toller consistently emphasised, must be the avoidance of any unnecessary expense. Rogerson, who had been given a free residence, was on a pittance, and could not possibly be asked to keep locking and unlocking the gate at all hours of the day and night; which very possibility led, moreover, to the virtual certainty that, sooner rather than later, the gate would be left open, and the public think themselves in possession once more, and act accordingly. Every time Rogerson would have to unlock, then relock; then submit to being knocked up again, at some quite unpredictable moment, and go through the same motions again, when the party, or perhaps only a single individual, saw fit to depart. On top of that, the individual, or some members of the party, would frequently be half-demented, or at least under stress, and in need of support; perhaps of a pot of strong tea, in the name of simple humanity. At his age and rate of pay, Rogerson simply could not be expected to provide such ser
vices; and far, far less to perform the other quite obviously necessary service of showing visitors the way through the gathering jungle to the particular grave they happened to be interested in, standing about for an indefinite period while the visitor or visitors mourned over some person he had never heard of, and then tramping all the way back through the tall, wet weeds. No one should suppose, Mr. Toller pointed out sharply, that the bereaved normally knew the route to their particular destination: experience in Mr. Yarwood’s time showed that very few of them did, and in those days the cemetery had been fairly well kept up, and plant growth rigidly kept down. Rogerson hardly knew where a single particular grave was situated, nor was he being asked to know. To perform the whole gamut of activities that Mr. Toller had outlined would call for a functionary of a quite different type, who would have to be paid accordingly, and supplied with several assistants. The entire proposition was totally impracticable. Such money as might be available to the Council after salaries and expenses had been paid and loans serviced, was required for the living. Mr. Toller said things like that in the most convincing way.

  The Committee sat impassive; nor could Crickmay himself find any very firm ground upon which to argue. None the less, he was uneasy.

  At the library and in his flat, and in other, earlier, hide-outs, he had delved enough into history to know that, in former times, the whole business of commemoration had been approached quite differently: it had then been the soul and the monument which were considered to matter, and the body had been little more than dumped. “Hugger-mugger” had been Hamlet’s exact description, even though in partial deprecation, the body immediately in question being that of a court official and potential relative. The medievals would have had views of their own on the running of a cemetery. To them the mere materialities of disposal would have been hardly a problem at all.