Compulsory Games

by Robert Aickman

  What was it that had been gnawing away at him, even while Mr. Toller had been expounding major matters so eloquently?

  “Two corpses,” Mr. Toller had said, even though half in badinage.

  Crickmay felt greener than the hands and wrists of his associates.

  How could such people have been elected to the governing body of a modern local authority? Long ago, perhaps; but nowadays. . . . Probably more to the point was the fact that Crickmay had never observed either Mr. Jonas or Mr. Jarman within the Council Chamber itself; nor many of his other now absent colleagues. He had always assumed that they had been there off and on, without his having particularly identified them. He knew quite well that he did not always look up very much. Now he thought otherwise: they had never been there; none of them. They were interested in the one committee only.

  And whatever was Mr. Huddlesford doing? A person so obviously up to something in the cemetery itself should surely put in an occasional appearance at a Committee meeting?

  Now Mr. Jonas and Mr. Jarman were leaving the room. To Crickmay’s unsettled mind, their four feet sounded on the uncovered municipal floor as if the feet were uncovered too. Moreover, Mr. Jonas and Mr. Jarman were making their exit arm in arm, as if it were still the middle of the nineteenth century.

  “Reuben! Roderick!” rapped out Mr. Toller, from the Chairman’s slightly advantageous position. “Come back, please, or we shall lack a quorum.”

  The writing man had ceased to write, and had bent his eyes upon vacancy, though in a slightly upward direction.

  Alas, Mr. Jonas and Mr. Jarman ignored the call. They passed inexorably, though laboriously, through the glass door, each politely holding it open for the other. Crickmay felt that, once outside, they vanished.

  So that day the complaints went unconsidered, even though the quorum was only three. Well might Mr. Toller return to the attack and remark, on a rising note, to Crickmay that the Committee was becoming unworkable. Well might the general public lament the irresponsibility of their representatives. Crickmay could see for himself that upon him a new burden rested. There could be no escape until the cemetery had been recolonised once and for all; by Hefferman or another. And that must hang upon the sluggish inquisitions of local democracy in the wider sense.

  •

  In the meantime, conditions could only become worse than ever, and then worse still. The cemetery had entered into the shadowland of blight.

  Crickmay knew perfectly well that such was even the official term in these cases where the official interest encroached upon more traditional procedures, as the official interest increasingly did. How could an elderly person like Rogerson be expected to cope with such complications? No wonder he fell back more and more upon his own little world, so that the ball of fire in his window now glowed warmly every hour of the night, as if the door of a furnace would for some reason no longer shut.

  •

  It may be as well to turn our eyes away from the cemetery for a period of two years and five months and seventeen days from that meeting at which the Committee put forward its recommendations nem. con.

  Mr. Jonas and Mr. Jarman no more resumed their contribution to the work of the Committee than Mr. Huddlesford had done, or a whole platoon of other veterans. Not a single one of them even sent apologies; the common courtesy of those who neither send nor give anything else.

  The absence of apologies equated with the absence of a quorum; which seemed likely to be as permanent as any curacy.

  The committee was reduced to informal meetings in Mr. Toller’s private abode.

  Mrs. Toller, though suffering from nervous trouble, had to be brought down to make up the minutes, as the man whose job it was, thought it best not to appear in an official capacity outside the official arena. Sometimes, in the end, there was tea; or a drink made from sweet orange juice; occasionally a few mixed biscuits.

  One trouble was that, in all the circumstances, the involvement of New Blood in the work of the Committee could only with difficulty be justified. Rogerson seemed enduring as the rock of ages, which he so closely resembled; and the situation as a whole to be as static as any situation could be, even though it was sinking fairly fast, as every static situation does. There were other committees which New Blood was bound to find more human and relevant, altogether more alive.

  It was not that Mr. Toller had omitted to have a word with Maurice Cheale. One upshot had been that the Council in full session had taken less than a minute to condone the Committee’s informality and with no time limit set thereto. It would hardly be worth attempting an alteration in the Statutory Rules; a matter about which many feel more deeply than about anything else.

  “If all goes well, the Cemetery Committee will soon die of its own accord,” observed one councillor.

  And at the expiration of the period named above, all did go well, or seemed to. Heffermans moved in. The Committee expired without pain.

  As a first step, the entire cemetery area was surrounded by an entanglement of barbed wire, as if it had been Hill 40. Guard dogs were promised by notices in simple language at five-yard intervals; though none of the actual and living dogs would stay as appointed. Some of them even tore themselves to pieces on the wire.

  It had been noticed for a long time that the entire doggy tribe, formerly so abundant in the cemetery grounds, had forsaken the place. It had become difficult even to keep dogs as pets in the near-by houses.

  “Well,” said Mr. Toller to Crickmay, a few days later, “that’s that, my boy, and thank you for all your help, including at some remarkably tight spots. I promise you I’ll not forget. In fact, I recommended you this morning to Maurice Cheale for that place on the Stationery Supplies Committee. Perhaps you didn’t hear about it? That should be a subject where you’re an expert.” They were standing just outside the Chamber, and Mr. Toller gave Crickmay several sharp pats on the back for all to see.

  “What about Rogerson?”

  “It’s been settled for him to be kept on. Heffermans won’t get round to knocking down The Lodge for a long time to come. There’s not one thing to worry about. After storm and battle, we can hand over with conscience clear. The Council owes you a lot, Oswald.”

  Owing to the passage of the five months and seventeen days, the sun was shining as if for the publicity, and simple-hearted birds warbling in the flowering cherries. Crickmay had not previously noticed these things, but now he could see and hear for himself. Indeed, we may suppose that at more or less this point he ceased to be a central personage in the cemetery’s history. He even decided not to stand and fight at another Council election.

  •

  From the first, there had been a group of agitators on and off the Council who criticised the Hefferman project on principle and put forward an alternative akin to the third possibility proposed by Mr. Toller at the start: it was that the cemetery area should be levelled (apart from the incurable natural slope), bedded, provided with fixed seats and ample toilet accommodation, and converted into a wild garden for public recreation; “old roses rather than zinnias,” as one middle-aged gentleman put it. The notion might appeal more to the elderly and retired than to anyone else among the general public, but that was only appropriate; especially as an accompanying notion was to build Autumn Homes for just such people all over the surrounding district.

  Ecological, conservation, gerontological, and vegetarian groups convened meetings in halls and institutes, pushed leaflets through doors, and appealed for donations, but no one that mattered would have taken them seriously had it not been for the difficulties that Heffermans were encountering, and which were soon putting the viability of their project into doubt.

  It began in the usual way with tools and protective clothing being taken, engines in the mechanical diggers being filled with sand, and the early workings strewn with detritus, some of it impolite.

  As experienced modern contractors and developers, Heffermans took such things for granted and had allowed for them, amply, in the
costings; but trouble of a more serious kind began when it was discovered that most of the graves appeared to be too shallow for decency, presumably owing to Mr. Yarwood having cut corners, as the saying goes. It would seem that he had done so habitually; no doubt in response to his committee’s incessant demand for economy.

  The litter of members, coffin gadgets, and general mysteries that had disfigured the cemetery for so long, was thus more fully accounted for; but some of the toilers made it clear to their foreman, to the clerk of the works, and to the world in general that they cared for their task less and less.

  “It’s like the clear-up after a raid, when we were in a rush, like.”

  “We’re not shoving them down, mate. We’re grubbing them up.” The various workers who uttered might have been natural leaders or they might have been blokes who could never keep their traps shut.

  The great majority of the workers hardly spoke at all. They merely went in for absenteeism.

  Soon it became almost impossible to recruit the right type of man; and several specimens of an extremely wrong type began to show up. Naturally, these persons were shunned by one and all; which compounded the labour problem. Indeed, one and all soon refused to work anywhere near these people; and then to work anywhere else.

  Things were complicated by pretty steady rain, which continued, more on than off, for weeks at a time, and emulsified tissue and earth alike, all to the accompaniment of an even more penetrating smell than had marked the cemetery before Heffermans arrived. “The job stinks,” the workers began to say.

  Here and there, a worker staggered home and broke down completely amongst his terrified kiddies. Certificates began to be issued in bulk.

  Rogerson, despite his round red glow, could not be asked to act as night watchman on top of everything else; and those who did accept that task, and had to sit all night within the wire, disappeared, in one way or another, almost as soon as nominated. There was at least no danger of any watchman falling asleep at his post. The soft and silken burrowing of the worms was alone enough to kill all thought of sleep; or so it was hinted in the bars, and sometimes even spoken right out, in what men call jest. And most of the time there were other sounds, that could not be accounted for in any way, at least by relatively un-educated toilers sitting tautly for long hours in tarpaulin shacks.

  At first, the bars seemed always full. Then only the desperate would drink in them: a tidy force everywhere, but not enough to make a place pay.

  The groups that had from the first objected on principle gathered support with every daylight hour and, as can be imagined, through the night also.

  It was a long, hot summer that year, almost everywhere in England, and, as always in England, terribly humid, even outside the cemetery district.

  “I wish they’d get on and finish it,” the mothers moaned to one another, even though many had in the first place opposed the project.

  In truth, things were going more and more slowly, until now many workers inside the wire believed that the apogee had been passed some time ago and that the project was on balance sliding backwards and downwards.

  “You can’t do anything worth while except with slaves,” as a young architect put it, who had read discriminately at his university.

  Even the high thick bushes and thickets sustained an unprecedented resistance to being cut back, cut down, and cleared. Blood poisoning was recognised as one of the explanations for absence. The dead briars, yellow or brown, were almost more lacerating than the live briars, green or red; perhaps because, being dead, they were taken less seriously, or not taken seriously at all.

  In the end, there were three known cases of actual death from septicaemia; and many others “suspected” (in the official term) among workers who had been heard from, or heard of, no more.

  And one lovely lilac dawn an elderly man perished in the cemetery itself. “They knew the time it had happened because of the medical tests,” as the mothers explained.

  Still, no one knew what that particular man had been doing there. Apparently, he had not been one of the night watchmen; and if he had been somehow trapped in the cemetery at the hour when his fellows hastened away, as would have seemed very likely, then surely he could have engaged the attention of a watchman or even of an outsider, if necessary by yelling?

  At the inquest, the evidence was that the man’s head had very nearly been twisted right off. He was a lifelong bachelor and abstainer, and there was nothing at all to account for the disaster. Driven to extremes, some began once more to speak of Mr. Yarwood.

  At the outset, though for a very brief period of spring, the cemetery had seemed alive with rowdy, heaving machines. For a spell, the boys had stood looking at them, yearning for them, as once they had looked and yearned for ghosts. Because Heffermans believed in going all out from the very first moment, there had been a myriad men, like animalculae on soft cheese, moving slowly about or resting. Now there had been hardly a sound for weeks. The peace of the grave had almost reinstated itself. Even Rogerson’s light had apparently gone out for the summer, though none had noticed when.

  In the nature of things, Heffermans tried what better pay and conditions could do. They raised wages and even salaries; offered bonuses; dangled danger money (though almost every worker on the site seemed to qualify for it in one way or another, and often in several ways at once, at least in the worker’s opinion). They leased a ward in a local hospital for mending broken limbs, tiding over flesh wounds, and reducing fevers. They brought back quite young women who had retired from nursing upon marriage. They accepted offers of recreation rooms from bodies such as the Y.M.C.A. and Toc H. They lengthened tea breaks.

  On the Eve of St. John, there was a sort of fire in the cemetery. At least, that was how the boys who had seen it described it at school the next morning to the boys who had not; though nowadays none of them of course knew about St. John’s Eve.

  One might say that there was more light than heat, though not so much light either. This might have been partly because the light came in so many different colours, and in all colours at once; certain of them, colours not commonly seen by school-boys, though apprehended, possibly, by Sir Isaac Newton and Goethe, inside their own clever heads. The lights seemed sometimes to come in moving, luminous walls; sometimes in all-enveloping vestments; sometimes in demonic squibs that fizzed about ceaselessly, though, it would seem, silently. “It was a proper pantomime,” as one of the boys said, though not at the time.

  In the end, recourse was had to the Fire Service; that often troublesome department which takes over when nothing seems likely to avail but resource, physique, and heroism: the lands-man’s lifeboat service.

  The firemen, having hauled at the bell handle and knocked as only firemen knock, laid axes to the door of The Lodge, because there the air was roasting and sulphurous, and flames might break out at any moment.

  In fact, that was what they immediately did.

  The first two firemen were driven back at once, even though no one could claim previously to have seen through the window a flicker inside The Lodge itself. As people had said there was a man in the little abode (which was why the door had been broken down in the first place), the Fire Service excelled itself in every kind of attempted rescue. But flames spurted from chimneys, doors, windows, and bylaw ventilators, until soon the structure resembled a single blazing pineapple, which in no time at all crumbled inwards into nothingness.

  Fortunately, the view became accepted that Rogerson had left some time ago. It was suggested that he had probably departed in the small dark hours, so as not to disclose the paucity of his exhibitable possessions. A pensioner’s pride must be allowed for always.

  Within the cemetery itself, the firemen made less impact. There was almost nothing they could do with their gear, and of course the ground had not been prepared for it or them. Soon they were declaring that the phenomena were outside their range. References were made to the aurora borealis and to Hellfire.

  Inevitably, the n
ext thing, and on the very next day, was a strike. The terrain was not merely treacherous to walk on, bursting with evil vegetation (especially at midsummer), pullulating with decomposition and infection: it was now a fire risk also. That was the end.

  Heffermans did not believe in dallying before cutting losses. They withdrew; and, as they put it, for good.

  Absolute peace, total mystery established themselves within the rusting wire, which Heffermans had not arranged to remove, despite its value as scrap. LEAVE THE DEAD ALONE, some person or persons had chalked upon what remained of the circumambient wall. There is always one graffito that seems to outlast all the others in the community.

  •

  Still, one day, something would have to be done; surely?

  In principle, the Council had no objection to someone else “redeveloping” the area for office clumps and vehicle parks. The process would add to the amenities, increase the yield from the rates, and reduce the demands and complaints. The ideal community would undoubtedly be one in which nobody resided, just as the ideal shopping precinct is one in which no soft, wet, edible, or odorous commodities are offered, but only plastic durables, rotating as rapidly as possible. But property men like to go with the favouring wind, and the failure of the Hefferman project had gangrened the entire, always ailing area. The sickness deepened and spread with every year that passed. The sum lost by Heffermans mounted and mounted, as the tale was told, and the accounts repeatedly analysed. It became harder and harder to doubt that more consideration would have to be given to the cemetery’s original residents.

  Oswald Crickmay had perhaps been the first to divine this truth quite specifically. It was difficult to be sure, because so few people speak of their real beliefs; especially in public life. In any case, by now, young and old were remembering strange things that had happened in Bishop Auckland or in Colwyn Bay when they had been small children, or their fathers or grandparents had been. The power of the dead could penetrate the foggy tissue of things seemingly under control.