SLEEP NO MORE

by L. T. C. Rolt

  It was an excellent meal, efficiently served by the same soft-footed manservant who had admitted him, but Thornton did not enjoy it. His host and hostess made themselves very agreeable, but their talk somehow seemed to have that forced quality of adults speaking to a child, while the glances which he intercepted suggested that they shared a life of which he knew nothing. He felt no desire to be enlightened. At one period during the meal there was an interruption. Something, a large dog presumably, snuffed and scratched at the door. James called out sharply some unintelligible word and there was silence.

  Afterwards, as they sat over coffee and liqueurs in the library, James suggested that Jeanne should play for them. She complied readily and, seating herself at the grand piano, she began to play softly some slow, sensuous piece which Thornton could not identify, but which reminded him strongly of Debussy’s ‘L’Après midi d’un Faune’. It was obvious that she was an extremely competent pianist, yet Thornton decided that he liked her playing even less than her painting. While the voluptuous languor of the music seduced his senses there was yet some nightmare quality about it which revolted his reason. Like everything else in that house, it was beastly, and that, he thought, was the only word for it. It was not merely that James had become a voluptuary. That he could easily understand and excuse, even though he might regret it. Intuition told him that it was something much worse than that. He suddenly knew that he could not bear to stay a moment longer. He got to his feet, apologising for his rudeness and muttering something about having no key to his hotel.

  As the front door closed behind him and he felt the cool night air in his face he experienced an indescribable sense of relief. He set off at a brisk pace, resolved that nothing would induce him to visit Trevarthen again. But when he reached the corner he turned to take a last look at the house. As he did so, the front door opened and a figure, which he recognised to be that of James, was sharply silhouetted against the rectangle of light. He seemed to be peering out as though looking for something or someone. And then he saw, dimly visible in the light from the windows, that this unknown someone was in fact moving to meet him. Something about its shape and the way it crouched was very familiar to Thornton, and he confesses that at this point he turned and ran, nor did he stop running until he reached his car.

  The Shouting

  I COMPANIONED EDWARD on many walking tours before I discovered that he had a positive phobia about woods. There was always some very good reason why we should not go through one: the obvious path, though marked on the Ordnance Survey map, might peter out or turn in the wrong direction; if it was hot there would be too many flies in the wood; if it was evening it would be too dark; half the fun of walking was the view and obviously there could be no view in a wood.

  But at last there came a day when none of these pretexts could avail him. On the contrary: it was quite obvious to us, both from the map and from the lie of the land, that to avoid going through this particular wood (which was quite a small one, incidentally), would involve a needless and lengthy cross country detour including scrambling through many hedges—just the kind of point to point walking that does not appeal to me. On the other hand, it was perfectly clear from the stile at the edge of the wood and the path beyond it that there lay a well-used right of way. Yet Edward stopped in his tracks and, knowing there was no valid excuse left to him, said, with an unmistakable fear in his eyes, ‘I’d rather not go through that wood if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Come on,’ I said, ‘it’s only about a quarter of a mile wide judging from the map, and if we leave the path we’re in for a hell of a scramble.’ Seeing that he still hesitated, I mounted the stile with a ‘Well, suit yourself; I know which way I’m going’ over my shoulder. I think it was the nearest we ever came to a row in all our time together.

  What followed was really very odd, and cast an entirely new and strange light on my friend. It’s odd how long you can know people and yet suddenly discover that you know so little.

  Edward padded silently behind me, his eyes darting to right and left as though that harmless Herefordshire coppice harboured every species of savage beast, with the odd poisonous snake thrown in for good measure. But it was no laughing matter at the time, and I confess that I felt a shade uneasy myself, for it was quite obvious that Edward was terrified almost out of his wits.

  I was determined to get to the bottom of this unreasoning terror, and that evening in the Scudamore Arms at Combercombe I tackled him about it.

  ‘I’m sorry I persuaded you to walk through that spinney with me. Honestly, if I’d realised that you felt so strongly about . . . ’

  He cut me short. ‘Yes. The truth is that all woods scare me stiff.’

  ‘ “My mother said I never should play with the gipsies in the wood”,’ I quoted at him rather tactlessly.

  Edward gave me a curiously searching look. ‘What made you say that?’ he asked sharply. Then he went on, ‘This has nothing whatever to do with cautionary nursery jingles of that kind. It’s due to something that happened to me only ten years ago, just before I met up with you in fact.’ And then it all came out.

  He was staying in an isolated rented cottage in the bottom of one of those deep and narrow valleys that run down to the Atlantic coast of North Devon and Cornwall. The ridges between them end in formidable bare headlands and vertiginous cliffs that jut out to meet the challenge of Atlantic rollers, but one does not have to go far inland from the coast before their lower slopes are thickly covered with dense woods of scrub oaks, their tops combed by the prevailing south-westerlies that funnel up the valleys till they resemble a smooth green fleece.

  Well, Edward said he was lolling in a deck-chair outside his cottage door and enjoying the hot sunshine of late July, when he suddenly heard the patter of feet and the chatter of children approaching down the lane. This surprised him, as there was no village within miles, but when he saw them he thought they must be children of gipsies who had camped nearby, for they were all olive-complexioned with black hair and sloe eyes. They were chattering eagerly together as though anticipating some rare treat, but for the life of him he could not distinguish a word they said. Could they be speaking Romany? he asked himself. Surely not.

  A boy, who looked about fourteen and appeared to be the eldest and the ringleader of the group, was in front, and as they passed opposite his cottage gate, Edward got up from his chair, stopped the little party and asked their leader where they were going. Speaking in perfect English the boy replied, ‘Oh, we are going up into the woods for the shouting.’ The way he said this implied that Edward ought to have known the answer without having to ask. But before he could betray his ignorance by asking what he meant, the boy had broken into a trot and the others, silent now but still radiating a tense expectancy, followed him. Edward watched them cross the little wooden footbridge over the stream and then mount the slope until they disappeared into the wood. Then he went back to his deck-chair pondering on this odd little encounter until he began to doze again.

  He was roused by what he described as a most unearthly racket: a shrill eldritch piping and shrieking rising every now and again to a frenzied pitch. So this was ‘the shouting’. It struck him as a scarcely human sound, sometimes reminding him of the squealing of slaughtered pigs and sometimes of the strange cries he had once heard coming from a heronry. But what puzzled and disturbed him even more was that this shrill clamour seemed to have an accompanying ground bass, a kind of plain chant that was somehow far more horrible to hear—and at this point Edward became almost alarmingly emphatic—than the shouting itself. There could be no one in that party of children with a voice like that, he speculated; it must be an acoustic trick, something like the sound of the sea beating on the rocks at the end of the valley, unnaturally echoed and magnified in that narrow space between the hanging woods. So he rationalised his fear, knowing in his heart that such an explanation could not be true.

  It was some time before the children came back: long enough for the sun to have left th
e floor of the valley, although it still shone brilliantly upon the higher slopes above. They walked silently, two by two, over the wooden footbridge and past Edward’s gate with never a sideways glance. He might not have been there, leaning over the gate watching them, he said. Soft-footed, they passed him by as though they were entranced, their lips slightly parted, their sloe eyes staring fixedly ahead as though focused upon some remote distance. Young though the children were, Edward admitted he found this strange procession very awe-inspiring.

  He had sat on for a while in the deepening shadow before at length curiosity got the better of him, and he set off towards the wood in the direction the children had taken. He had noticed the spot where the children had entered the wood, for it was marked by a single ancient and stunted yew tree which contrasted darkly against the green foliage of the oaks and their silvery, lichen-bearded trunks and branches. Once he had climbed the fence and entered the woods he found no path, although the way was still clear to him because the children had beaten down briars, nettles and bracken in their passing. Taller than they, he had to walk bent double to avoid the dense interlacement of branches. It was like walking through some low green tunnel. Suddenly, however, he could stand upright, for he found himself in a small round clearing in the midst of the wood. He thought it strange that it was not visible from below, considering the steepness of the slope, which had left him out of breath.

  In the centre of the clearing was a low mound of short green turf, like an island in a pool of bracken. Edward walked on to the top of this central mound, and it was at once obvious that it was here that ‘the shouting’ had taken place. Children were great traditionalists, he reflected; it was doubtless some old country game or ritual handed on by one generation to another.

  ‘My mother said I never should play with the gipsies in the wood.’ That silly jingle came into his head unbidden and refused to be banished. Evidently they did not forbid such play in these parts, but positively encouraged it. He laughed aloud at this feeble joke; and then he started at the most remarkable echo. Of course, woods were famous for this kind of thing, he thought, but then something much more remarkable and alarming happened: the laugh was repeated from a different part of the clearing.

  This time it was no echo but a sound such as he had never made in his life; a deep, short sound, half bark, half bray, human and yet inhuman. The laugh came again almost the next instant, menacing this time, and from the opposite side of the clearing, although he had heard no sound of movement in the wood. At this Edward became terrified. He stood rooted to the spot, peering, now this way, now that, into the darkening wood in an attempt to locate the source of such a dreadful sound.

  When the laugh came a fourth time, it happened to sound from the precise direction in which he was peering. It may only have been some trick of the failing light, he admitted apologetically, but an inchoate mass of twigs and oak leaves seemed suddenly to form itself into a gigantic head: a head with an aureole of leafy twigs in place of hair, and a beard of grey lichen below a cruelly smiling mouth. There also appeared to be two red eyes, though this may have been the effect of the setting sun shining through chinks in the leafy canopy of the wood. But, on reflection, Edward thought not. It strikes him now as a last desperate attempt on the part of his rational mind to explain in known terms the unknown. The next instant, sheer panic seized him, and he blundered out of the clearing and down through the wood.

  Trees, nettles, bracken and briars all seemed to conspire together to prevent his headlong flight. He nearly scalped himself on low branches, nettles stung him, briars whipped at his clothes and flesh, and tough bracken stalks tripped him so that more than once he sprawled headlong. And all the while that awful voice accompanied him, laughing and chuckling over his plight. He thought that if again he should see the face from which it came his reason would snap. Nor could he bear much longer the sound of that voice and, in a vain attempt to drown it, he began to yell at the top of his voice the first ridiculous words that entered into his head. ‘Mother said I never should play with the gipsies in the wood,’ he screamed hysterically.

  By the time he finally flung himself over the fence at the edge of the wood his clothes were in tatters and blood was streaming down his forehead and into his eyes from the lacerations on his head. But the horror had left him and, thankfully, he flung himself down on the cool turf, which was now slightly damp with dew. There below him was the dim shape of his cottage beyond the stream, and he gazed at it as a traveller from the desert gazes at an oasis.

  ‘And that was that,’ concluded my friend. ‘Now you know why I dislike—no, dislike is too mild a word—why I hate woods.’

  ‘But what about those children?’ I queried. ‘Did you . . . ’

  He answered my question before I had finished as, with a shrug of the shoulders, he replied, ‘No. There were no gipsies in the district at the time. I made sure of that, and I am equally certain they weren’t local children either.’ After a pause he went on, ‘I asked the good lady from Mortford, who came every day on her bike to do the chores for me, whether there was any legend or traditional custom connected with that particular piece of woodland. But all she would say was “I dunno, sir, us do never goo in ther”.’

  So your guess is as good as mine as to who or what the children were. Personally, now that I have heard Edward’s story, I am inclined to think they may have been the most frightening thing about the whole strange business.

  The House of Vengeance

  THE BUS FROM HEREFORD came to a stop in the somnolent square of the little Welsh border town. The sliding door clashed open and John Hardy, shouldering his haversack, followed two plump and basket-laden farmers’ wives on to the pavement. It was a perfect spring afternoon: sunlight drenched the square and, as the clatter of the bus died away along the road towards Brecon, the town’s rudely interrupted peace was quickly restored. The cracked bell in the Victorian clock tower chimed twice. Three thirty: he would have to step it out, thought John, if he was to make the Priory Hotel at Llanvethney before darkness fell.

  He was quite unfamiliar with this Welsh border country, but his friend Alan Brett had explained to him that the hotel where they had arranged to meet and stay lay in a long and narrow valley on the other side of the Black Mountains. Alan knew these mountains like the back of his hand, and had enthused to John so often about them that he had finally persuaded his friend to join him at the Priory Hotel for a week’s walking holiday so that he could become more closely acquainted with their beauties. Because Alan had assured him he was fully equipped, John had not bothered to acquire any large-scale maps of the area. But he did not anticipate any difficulty in finding his way, as a preliminary glance at his one small-scale map had shown a bridle road that led out of the little town, over a high mountain pass, and so down into the head of the valley in which their rendezvous was situated.

  Walking briskly, he had soon cleared the outskirts of the old town—it was little larger than a village, anyway—and set his face towards the encircling hills. He had done a great deal of walking in the Cumberland Fells and the Pennines and thought that, by contrast, the prospect before him, though pleasing enough, looked rather tame. Surely these gentle hills could not be the wild mountains that Alan had praised so highly. He had covered about five miles, however, when the way veered sharply to his right and began to climb steeply up the flank of a deep and narrow gorge. It was when he had climbed to the head of this gorge that he realised that the hills were merely so many stepping stones to the greater heights which they had hitherto effectually concealed.

  A very different prospect now greeted him. He found himself upon the edge of a huge plateau of unenclosed upland, an expanse of short, springy turf tufted here and there with uncurling bracken fronds and starred with hundreds of sheep. From this plateau there rose majestically along the southern skyline the great gables of a range of mountains. A confirmed ‘mountainy’ man, John found this prospect very much more to his liking, and he strode out with a wi
ll along the track which he could see climbing ahead of him round the knees of the mountains in the direction of the head of the pass.

  Meanwhile the range of the Brecon Beacons in the middle distance, which normally appeared blue and remote, had become darkly threatening, its outline sharply etched against a great wall of storm cloud which was rolling up the western sky behind them. Had he not been so intrigued with the new prospect and better acquainted with the vagaries of the Welsh border country, so experienced a walker could scarcely have failed to notice so obvious a threat of impending weather change.

  When he had climbed to the head of the pass, he saw that the track swung away to his left to enter a narrow defile between two mountain bluffs. For a few moments John thought that the reason why it suddenly seemed to have become so dark and chilly was that the further of these two bluffs obscured the westering sun, throwing the pass into deep shadow. In fact, this dark flank of the mountain concealed from him the swiftly advancing storm wrack which had already swallowed up the sun.