The Green Man

by Kingsley Amis

  My spirits, which had been improving a little, fell again sharply when I contemplated the four hours that had somehow to be filled in. I still had no idea where I was making for, and the mere action of driving at speed towards no destination had the effect of emphasizing to me my anxiety to escape, which soon started to make me feel as if I were being pursued by some malignant person or thing. Only as if; I was perfectly clear in my mind that nobody and nothing was pursuing me; but I have never known a powerful illusion of this kind to be appreciably weakened by being recognized as an illusion. I had touched eighty on the A595, and missed a head-on collision with a petrol tanker by a few seconds, before it occurred to me that no speed is great enough to permit a man to escape from himself. I found the banality of this idea soothing, and was able to drive less furiously thereafter.

  I stopped at the George on the outskirts of Royston, ate some tongue sandwiches, drank a pint and a half of bitter, took a pill, bought a quarter-bottle of White Horse and drove on. In Cambridge I went into a cinema, and sat through forty minutes of a wide-screen Western (in which, apart from much talk and even more dead silence, one man shot at another and missed) before deciding that I felt too tense and jittery to continue. On bad days, sitting in a cinema can give me a curiously strong foretaste of dying, out of some fortuitous combination of the darkness, the felt presence of unseen strangers, the vast, unnaturally-coloured, ever-changing images, the voices that are not quite like voices. I walked the streets for a while, counting my footsteps and telling myself that something interesting was going to happen between three hundred and three hundred and fifty, and that this would show everybody that Allington was a good judge, whose predictions could be relied on. By the three hundred and forties nothing remotely interesting had turned up, not even a passable woman, so I settled for the stand of paperbacked novels I could see through the window of a supermarket. The place was still open; I went in and bought something I had never heard of by a writer whose first book, a satire on provincial life, I remembered had been commended at the time. In the little cocktail bar of the University Arms, I got through about forty minutes’ worth of this too, before going out and dropping it into a rubbish basket on the way back to my car. To the endemic unreality of all fiction, the author had added contributions of his own: an inability to leave even the most utilitarian sentence unadorned by some verbal frill or knob or curlicue, recalling those savage cultures whose sacred objects and buildings are decorated in every square inch; a rooted habit of proceeding by way of violent and perfunctory transitions from one slackly observed scene to the next; and an unvaried method of characterization whereby, having portrayed a person as one sort of cliché, he presently revealed him as a predictable different sort of cliché. Oh well, what had I expected? The thing was a novel.

  On the road again, and in the dark this time, I very soon felt panic settling upon me. I had reason (of a sort) to feel afraid of encountering Underhill; this was nothing to do with that, a pure, unmotivated, objectless fear that, in my boyhood, had sent me running out of the house and across the common that it faced until I could literally not run any more, and, later, had caused me to read the entire contents of a newspaper aloud to myself as fast as possible while I tapped first one foot and then the other as fast as possible. This is a poor frame of mind in which to drive a car among traffic moving at between thirty miles an hour and sixty-five or more on a not particularly wide road. Each time, as I pulled out to overtake in the face of a column of oncoming headlights or at the approach to a blind corner, rational fear seemed as if it would drive out irrational fear for ever, to recede unnoticed and unremembered as soon as the danger was past.

  The accident took place on a bend of the A595 about three miles south of Royston and four from home. I caught up with a largish car, a Humber Hawk or something similar, which was ambling along at about forty, and started to pass it a couple of hundred yards from the start of the bend, not an outstandingly dangerous manoeuvre provided the Hawk maintained its original speed. No doubt spurred by an idiot resentment at being overtaken by a car half the size of his, its driver accelerated instead. As, more or less side by side, the two vehicles began curving round to the left, an immense articulated lorry, chains of red lights outlining its extra wide load, appeared from the other direction. I had not the m.p.h. to pass the Hawk, and could not predict what it might do; so, trusting to my memory of a road I had travelled four times a week for seven years, I swung to the right across the front of the lorry and into the wide grass verge I hoped very much was there. It was there, but rougher and more sloping than I had thought. These features slowed me down, at any rate, and I was not going very fast when I drove into the brickwork of a culvert (as I learned later) and hit my head on something.

  ‘Are you all right, mate?’ asked a voice.

  ‘Yes, thank you..’

  ‘Well, you bloody well oughtn’t to be. You daft or something? Double-banking on a bend like that? Pissed, I suppose, like ‘em all.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Flat pissed, you must be, if you aren’t off your rocker. Yeah, he’s okay. No call to be, but he is, so he says.’

  Another voice spoke then, but I never remembered to what effect. I know only that, after some lapse of time, I was standing in front of my house while a car—a Humber Hawk, perhaps—receded into the distance. I felt like a man on the moon, almost weightless, or as if on the point of disembodiment, like myself after a heavy night and a heavy lunch, like a child, observant without expectation, curious and disinterested.

  It was eight minutes to midnight. Just nice time, I said to myself. Indoors, everything was quiet and in darkness. Splendid. I went to the bar and fetched a tumbler, a siphon of soda and a bottle of Glen Grant, took a weak drink and a pill, and settled down in the public dining-room to wait the remaining two minutes. I sat at a corner table in the part where Underhill’s parlour had been, with just the one heavily shaded light in front of me turned on, out of consideration to him. I was almost directly facing the window at which he was accustomed to make his appearances, with the hall door diagonally opposite. The night was warm, but not humid.

  Very faintly, I heard the church clock in the village begin striking midnight. I could not remember whether, with clocks that do not strike the quarters, the first note or the last signified the hour. Nothing happened, at any rate, while the clock was striking. And nothing happened after it had finished, either. I waited. The clock must be fast. But my own watch said two and a bit minutes after twelve.

  By ten past I had decided that I had got the whole thing wrong, I had misunderstood Underhill’s message, it had not been a message at all, I had been mistaken about the freshness of the ink, he had just been seeing if I could be fooled into keeping this appointment, he had been joking. But I was not going to give him up yet. I sat there, unable to find any way of helping the time to pass. Through my mind went thoughts of Joyce, and Amy, and Diana, and my father, and Margaret, and the young man, and death, and ghosts, and drink, and Joyce again, and Amy again. In my current (perhaps precarious, but remarkably durable) state of detachment, all these topics struck me as very interesting but of no personal moment whatever, like, say, the New England whaling industry in the nineteenth century being considered by an intelligent and imaginative Grimsby trawlerman of our own time.

  I went on not looking at my watch for much longer than I would have thought was possible. Then I did. It was three minutes to one. Fine. To wait an hour was as much as politeness and sanity demanded. I poured a short weak drink and sipped it deliberately. As faintly as before, but, it seemed to me, more distinctly, the church clock sounded, and I got up to go.

  ‘Stay. I am come as I said I would,’ said somebody, somebody standing in the shadows of the corner directly opposite the door.

  ‘You’re late, Dr Underhill.’

  ‘Not so, I’ve been most punctual. Now to the purpose. Have you our silver friend about you?’

  I had not thought of this for hours, but when I felt i
n my pocket the thing was there. ‘Yes.’

  There was a sort of sigh from the corner. ‘That’s well. Be so good as to place it on the table before you.’

  I did as I was told. ‘There. What now?’

  ‘Now I’ll entertain you.’

  ‘Before you do, may I ask a question?’

  ‘Assuredly.’

  ‘When did you write that note asking me to meet you tonight?’

  ‘This morning, by your reckoning, the morning of the day just past. But yours was the hand that writ, mine merely the hand that guided yours.’

  ‘I don’t remember that.’

  ‘Not to remember is your quality, Mr Allington.’

  ‘Is that why you chose me to … assist you, or whatever it is you want me to do?’

  ‘How have I chosen you, when it is you that have each time come in search of me? But now, pray you, have done for the moment. There are many marvels in store.’

  I had time to admire the justice of my own description of the voice—sounding as if artificially produced, with a kind of Gloucester-cum-Cork accent—before Underhill’s show began. The room was suddenly and brightly illuminated, only it was not the room any more, but a cave, or a cave-mouth. A group of naked women flashed into apparent existence, in mid-performance of some sort of slow, writhing, vaguely Oriental ballet. Their voluptuousness was extreme, and also theoretical, like the fantasy-drawings of a prurient but talented schoolboy: enormous breasts, nipples that in proportion were even more enormous, tiny waists, spreading hips and buttocks, sexual organs displaced forwards into the V of the crotch, as in Indian sculpture. There was monotonous music and a strong scent of roses. I would have grinned at all this, had it not been for something two-dimensional about the dancers and their movements that gave me the uncomfortable sensation of watching them through an invisible telescope. And I did not feel happy about the pair of red eyes, apparently belonging to some small creature like a snake or a rat, that were watching me from farther back in the cave.

  The music grew louder, the smell of roses became insufferable and a troop of naked black men, of physical endowment so immense as to outdo the proportions of the women, leaped among them with loud yells. An orgy soon developed, cast and directed with a crudity that again might have made me want to laugh, but by now I had noticed the pallid, glistening coils of fungus that clung to the walls and roof of rock, and the second, larger pair of red eyes in the darkness of the cave, also fixed on mine. By their size and position, these might have belonged to a being about the size of a tall man. They did not move or blink.

  With a rippling, sticky jerk, as if what I saw were being magic-lanterned on to a thick sheet of gelatin, the orgy scene gave place to an encounter between two black girls and what I supposed was a white adolescent boy, though he was equipped on the same scale as his black predecessors and had long fair hair like a woman’s. This was even less to my taste than what had gone before, but before it disappeared in its turn the girls’ faces struck me as not resembling, even in colour, those of any black people I had ever seen—they were much more like the handiwork of someone who knew them only from descriptions. Behind the music, which had become lumpishly repetitive, a man’s voice, not Underhill’s, was calling, too faintly for any words to be distinguishable, though seemingly familiar.

  The new manifestation was two white girls making love, and went on for only a few seconds: an outstandingly abortive attempt to entertain me. When I looked again at the cave-mouth background, which had remained constant throughout, it was empty. I hoped very much that I had made some grimace or gesture by which Underhill had been able to read my discomfort; I did not want to think that he had seen it in my mind—still less that, just before, he had come across a buried memory of the afternoon and misread it as desire. By now the music, abandoning, so to speak, any attempt at rhyme and reason, had degenerated into an irregularly pulsating noise, and the smell was of decaying roses. But the two pairs of eyes were fixed on me as before.

  It was from hereabouts that the next development came. There was a stirring of some sort, and two obscure shapes started to emerge, moving with the foreshortened effect I had noticed earlier, so that the sideways component of their progress was unnaturally emphasized. As they moved, the illumination died down, but enough remained for me to be able to make out a sort of quadruped about the size of a small pig, and secondly a biped creature with the same kind of skin. It was of the rough general shape of a man, but it was not a man, nor any kind of ape or monkey.. I could not name what it and its companion were. The flesh of both looked soft and loose, and was indeed becoming softer and looser, was beginning to disintegrate and at the same time form itself anew. Limbs, if they could any longer be called limbs, dwindled and disappeared while fresh appendages came bulging, bursting, twisting out of the main trunk, which itself continuously changed shape in both cases. At one moment the two entities were united by a swelling rope of what could have been living matter, at the next the larger of the two started to divide about its longer axis. Either the whole sight was a reproduction, by another intelligence, of the hypnagogic hallucinations I was subject to, or I was imposing it on top of whatever illusions were now being directed at me, this while fully awake and with my eyes open. I felt my equanimity wearing thin.

  The accompanying noise, though as before destitute of pitch or any rhythm, still retained the capacity to vary in volume. In the quieter moments I could just make out Underhill’s voice, speaking in a monotone—the liturgical monotone I had heard coming from this part of the house during my night-vision of the previous afternoon. I looked down at the table in front of me. The silver figure had gone.

  This was much worse than anything that had happened so far. It was time to make a move. When I got to my feet, immediate and complete darkness descended, and at the same moment the noise changed to the beating of many wings and a shrill, cawing clamour, and the smell changed to that of an aviary or hen-house, though intolerably intensified. After a few seconds, the air round my head was full of tiny scarlet-green birds, scores of them, evidently phosphorescent, for they were as bright as if the sun had been shining on them, and yet there was no external source of light. Clacking their tiny beaks, they wheeled and plunged and dived at my face, striking me head-on in the cheekbone, at the point of the chin, over the eye, though I felt nothing, and then vanishing, winking out like a snuffed flame, though their number did not grow less. I closed my eyes, and they were there as before, put my hands over my closed eyes, and they were there, stuck my fingers in my ears, and the cawing and clacking went on. I had no breath to scream; from moment to moment I stove to work out where the door was, but each time one of them flew into my face I had to stop and start again. With my orientation hopelessly lost, I heard, through it all, Underhill laughing, and instantly found myself standing next to the ripped-up area of floor in my dining-room upstairs, putting the crucifix in my pocket (an action I had at once forgotten). The next instant I was back among the birds, but with my hand still, or again, holding the crucifix. With the birds redoubling their attacks and positively shrieking, I threw it where Underhill’s voice had seemed to come from, and heard it strike wall or floor.

  Slowly and steadily, what was happening to me changed. The birds began to confine themselves to the middle and left-hand side of my vision, and were growing oddly flattened, though they flew at me as before, while their noises progressively deteriorated in quality, with the precise effect of a wireless receiver being detuned a little at a time. Now the birds were gathered in a narrow and narrowing sector to my left, becoming wafer-like, as though the screen on which they were projected were being turned away from me towards the end-on position, and I could hear only a faint and undifferentiated roaring. Soon I was looking at a vertical line of flecked scarlet-and-green light, which faded to nothing in the silence. I was standing alone in the middle of the room, in darkness but for the moon through the windows.

  I realized that I must have turned off my table-lamp at some earlie
r point, and started to move to the switches by the door. On the way, my eye was caught by a gleam of metal on the floor in the corner where Underhill had first appeared. I picked up, not the crucifix, but the silver figure, and at once heard, from outside, a faint but familiar and dreadful rustling sound off to the right, and Amy’s voice calling me from the opposite direction.

  I ran out into the hall, to the front door, not stopping to turn on any lights, but my fingers knew the bolts, and I was out of the house almost immediately. Amy was about a hundred yards away down the road, wearing white pyjamas and carrying something in her arms: I assumed it was Victor. As she walked slowly towards the village, she was looking about her— in search of me? From the other side, that bizarre, rough-hewn, malformed shape was approaching, stiffly and clumsily, but steadily, with reserves in hand, and I remembered how I had seen its phantom quicken up as it drew near the house, and with what eventual result. This, however, was the reality, not the phantom, and I knew now, had known before I reached the front door, what Underhill’s second purpose had been—not merely to survive death, nor to subdue a living person to his will, but to reach from beyond the grave to bring about what I would see enacted within a minute, unless I could prevent it.

  The creature was jolting along at this stage in a version of a brisk walk, crackling as it moved, It looked larger than before, but also less compact, perhaps even yet not having achieved its final form. Evidently it had so far not seen me. I had lost three or four seconds already: I started forward and ran at top speed towards Amy along the grass verge, as silently as I could, but she heard me before I was within twenty yards of her, and began to turn. I shouted to her not to look round—in vain: she saw me, and then the green man, and her face went stretched and rigid. I reached her.