The Worm of Death

by Nicholas Blake

  How odd, thought Nigel, that in my last minutes on earth, I should be aware how the damp from these floorboards I’m sitting on is seeping through my coat, and feel quite resentful about it!

  “You imagine yourself the cunning, heroic avenger,” he said, conscious that an absurdly inappropriate lecturing tone was coming into his voice. “That’s another typical delusion, like the delusion that you’re going to get away with these murders.”

  “Perhaps I’m not. But, you see, I don’t care,” replied the young man with dreadful, unmistakable sincerity. “That’s why I’m so dangerous and why I’ve had all the luck so far—because I just didn’t care what happened to me, once I’d made my father bleed to death.”

  “I asked you once if you hadn’t got any ambition. You said you’d like to be a first-rate jazz pianist; but your face gave you away—you’d already achieved your ambition. Nevertheless, don’t flatter yourself that you killed him to avenge your mother. That’s a nice, convenient delusion. Makes you feel big, doesn’t it, the idea of being a ruthless avenger?”

  “Where will it hurt most to get the bullet?”

  “The fact is, you’re rotten with resentment. You smell of it. You kid yourself you did it as retribution for what your mother suffered. But you can’t even be honest about that. You were getting your own back for what happened to you as a boy after she died—you couldn’t take it, even then—lots of boys have gone through as bad or worse, and not turned into futile little self-pitying thugs. No, you’re just out for yourself. You killed your father because of that, and because you wanted to get your hands on your share of his money——”

  “That’s a lie!” Graham almost screamed.

  “——to bolster up your pitiful ego. You’d have cut your own mother’s throat if it had suited your book.”

  The silence that followed was more than the cessation of speech: it seemed to eat its way outwards like a pool of acid from the now just visible figure of Graham, corroding and corrupting the dank cabin against whose wall he stood. Nigel could talk no longer. He felt exhausted, exasperated, horribly soiled, too, rather than frightened. The barge creaked as another gust of wind struck it: overhead, a halyard chattered.

  “I could break your nose with a bullet,” said Graham at last in an almost erotic murmur. “Or plug you in the pit of the stomach.” The torch-beam moved down. “Or smash your knee-cap.” The beam focused on Nigel’s knees. “Go down on your knees.”

  “What?”

  “I said I’d make you grovel to me. If you go down on your knees and beg me for mercy, I’ll shoot you in the head. Otherwise, I’ll put the bullet where it’ll take you much longer to die.”

  “Judging by the way your hand is shaking I doubt if you could hit anything but the cabin wall.”

  “Go on. Grovel.”

  Nigel began to get up from the floor. Now he was on hands and knees, and just about to flex his legs into a sprinter’s starting position and hurl himself at Graham, who had come away from the side of the cabin and was standing only a few feet away. The floor felt slimy under Nigel’s hands. His muscles were cramped—they hadn’t the spring to launch him at his enemy. The thought flashed across his mind that in three seconds he would be paying for the trick he had played on James Loudron.

  Clare had made a running knot and noose with one end of the rope. She had taken a turn round a stanchion with the slack. Now, crouching at the side of the gap in the deck, she waited. She prayed for Graham to come out from beneath the shelter of the decking at the side of the cabin. She heard his threats, and saw the torch-beam moving from Nigel’s face to his stomach to his knees. And then, at last, Graham himself moved. He was standing almost directly beneath her.

  With the gesture of one throwing a hoop in a fairground booth, Clare tossed the noose, which spread out and fell over Graham’s head. The sound of its falling, the flash of it before his eyes, baulked Graham’s aim and at the same time startled him into pulling the trigger. The bullet flew higher than he had intended, and to the right. But, the instant before, Nigel had straightened up to make his desperate spring, so the bullet hit him in the left shoulder.

  Clare saw its impact send him staggering backwards, to fall from the edge of the broken floor into the hold. She hauled at the slack of the rope, made it fast, then jumped down through the gaping deck into the cabin. The noose had tightened round Graham’s neck, and Clare’s convulsive haul on the rope had lifted him off his feet. He dropped torch and revolver, to scrabble at the choking noose. He was stretching his toes, trying to reach the floor, a dangling, dancing puppet.

  Sobbing, Clare groped about for the torch on the slimy floor. Mercifully, the bulb had not been broken by the fall. She ran to the edge of the flooring. The torch-beam showed Nigel’s body, face down in the mud: he was slowly sinking into it, and without a struggle. Clare jumped down. The mud, glistening like chocolate blancmange, received her: she managed to get to her feet, but the mud was still up to her thighs, and when she tried for a purchase on Nigel’s shoulders, her feet slid on the slippery bottom of the barge.

  After a violent effort, holding the torch between her teeth, Clare turned Nigel’s body over so that his face, thick with mud, was exposed. Tearing off her head-scarf, she began to clear out the mud which plugged his nostrils. She did not know whether he was alive or dead—only that she must free him somehow from the viscous, porridge-like stuff which coated him all over. She was talking to him, or his corpse, in a loving, urgent murmur. “Wake up, darling,” she heard herself saying. “It’s Clare. You’re all right. Wake up! Please.”

  The clogged eyelids fluttered. The eyes opened. “Put out that bloody torch, you bastard,” Nigel mumbled.

  “Oh, thank God! It’s me, love.” She pulled him upright against her body, but his legs had no strength in them and it was almost impossible to prevent him buckling and collapsing into the mud again.

  “I can’t hold you up much longer,” Clare despairingly said.

  “Good old Clare.” Nigel sighed comfortably, as if he was about to go to sleep. She gave him a violent shake.

  “Ouch, that hurts, blast you, darling!”

  It woke Nigel up anyway.

  “Where did it hit you?”

  “Shoulder,” he said, wincing. “What do we do now?”

  Clare shone her torch along the hold. As far as its light reached, it showed nothing but a level expanse of mud. The floor through which Clare had jumped was just within reach of her fingers: she could drag herself up into the cabin, and run for help, but while she was getting it Nigel would sink down again into the ooze. And he was far too heavy for her to haul up, alone, with a rope. The deadly chill of the mud clasping her legs and thighs began to seep into her heart. Nigel opened his eyes a bit wider.

  “Why not yell for help?” he inquired.

  The extraordinary thing, Clare realised, was that in the stress and horror of the last few minutes, she simply had not thought of that.

  She yelled, time and again, at the top of her voice, feeling her cries snatched away by the gusty wind, drowned by the rattle of halyards and the stunning thumps of the unlashed rudder, or never even penetrating out of this mausoleum of mud and rotting timbers. They were heard, however, at last—by Harold Loudron, who came running out of a door of his house which gave direct on to the quay. All but spent, Clare heard him shout and then the noise of feet running along the deck. Nigel’s voice was raised to the rescuer now in a croak. “Look out! He’s got a revolver!”

  “It’s all right, darling,” said Clare. “He won’t use it.”

  “Graham? He certainly will—unless he’s escaped.”

  Light-headed with relief, Clare almost giggled. “Don’t fuss so. He can’t escape.”

  “What on earth d’you mean?”

  “I—he’s—well, you see, I hanged him.”

  CHAPTER XVIII

  Last Entry—In Full

  GRAHAM KNOWS. EVERYTHING. What he hadn’t guessed, I told him. He came into the study a couple
of nights ago and said, “You’re my real father, aren’t you?” I admitted it, I asked him how he had found out. It seems he’s been talking to some woman in Poplar or Millwall (what was he doing there, anyway?) who was a friend of Millie. That started him putting two and two together, for he’d somehow found out about those letters Millie wrote to me.

  He accused me of murdering her. I told him this was nonsense. He proceeded to give me, in his cold way, a very highly-coloured account of his mother’s last days. I did not let him see that every word was like a knife twisting in a wound. If only he had felt the horror of what he was relating, I should have broken down and implored him for forgiveness. But he was telling it all as a person tells a friend some malicious thing that has been said about the latter—with intent to discomfort, to note and enjoy the discomfiture. So my pride forbade me to indulge his curiosity and malice by breaking down under them.

  Forbade me also to take refuge behind Janet. Poor upright possessive Janet—it is she who was the real villain of the piece, intercepting and hiding those letters Millie wrote me at the last. I could never forgive her for it.

  And I was all the more implacable to Janet—I can confess it now—because I had an intuition, when the letters with my money orders for Millie began to be returned through the post with “not known at this address” scrawled upon them, that Millie would be writing to me direct. Yes, I had a faint suspicion that Janet was hiding something from me—her behaviour to me had changed—she never could dissemble. And for a while I let it pass, covertly relieved that I need not open up again the whole wretched, glorious affair of Millie.

  But I said nothing of this to Graham. It would have been squalid beyond all words to use Janet’s conduct as an excuse or palliative for my own.

  Perhaps I should have denied at the start that I am Graham’s father? I wish I could deny it. I hardly dare contemplate the sort of person I must be to have produced the person Graham is: Millie was a heart of gold: all Graham’s dreadful traits must be inherited from me.

  I was prepared to love him for Millie’s sake, to show him every indulgence; but what a strain he has put on my good intentions. He’d only been here a few months when he started pilfering in the home. And then that shocking business for which he was sacked from his school—that should have opened my eyes to his real nature, but I still refused to believe that a child of Millie’s could be irredeemably bad. I put it down to the hell he’d been through after she died.

  Well, yes, and I have liked him too—for his independence, his intransigence, the momentary gleams of charm which remind me of Millie, above all for his quick wits, his brains. James and Becky are worthy characters, no doubt, but they bore me: Harold I find an almost meaningless nonentity. Graham at least has never bored me.

  Now that my hours, as they say, are numbered (for I do not make the mistake of not taking Graham seriously), I begin to see my life as a sort of inferior Greek tragedy, full of ifs and if-nots and heavy ironies. The hamartia, the fatal flaw in myself which caused me to seduce Millie—from this everything has flowed. If I had not done so, Graham would not have been born, and Millie might still be alive. If Graham had not been born, there would have been no letters for Janet to intercept. If Janet had not then discovered about Millie, the last year of our marriage would not have been such as to erase all our previous life together and to alienate James and Becky from me: they have never forgiven me for their mother’s death. And if Janet had not died when she did, I doubt if Becky would have taken up with that mountebank Barn, or Harold married a nymphomaniac: fundamentally, these were gestures made against me, gestures of would-be emancipation.

  Yes, but wasn’t my affair with Millie such a gesture—the last wild fling of a family man, a middle-aged doctor, against the cramping restrictions of home and profession?

  No, it was not only that. It was more than an “affair”—I see it now, I knew it then, as the first time in my life I had acted purely on impulse, whole-heartedly, without calculation or self-regard. From the moment Millie came into my surgery, in the late autumn of 1939, I was possessed by her, I did not care what happened to me, my reputation, my family, so long as I had her love. The risks we took!—they make my blood run cold now: but, like a soldier who does not care whether or not he is killed, I bore a charmed life. We were never found out.

  Ah, a charmed life indeed. That young girl from the slums—what a flower she was! what passion and grace and sweet responsiveness! What a devotion behind it! No, I am not romanticising her. That incredible summer, picking her up at our secret rendezvous, driving out to our pub in Kent, when the baby had started and I knew the blitzes would soon begin—a time of irresponsibility for me, of the desperate, utter happiness which one only wrings out to the last drop because one knows how transient it must be.

  Since then I have never lived, never really lived only stayed alive.

  And when I told her she must go out of London, for the baby’s sake and her own, before the blitzes began, oh the heart-rending docility and the absolute faith in me which she showed then! Some tears, but not a word of reproach. Not a hint (how many women could have resisted it?) that perhaps I was getting tired of her or using her own welfare as an excuse for ending something that endangered my career.

  So she went away; and then she went on the streets and got ill and died—anything rather than be an encumbrance to me. Oh God! There should be a God to reward her. And I tried to forget her, playing the little hero amongst the bombs and the conflagrations. I just wanted to be dead. A charmed life again, though. Only twenty years ago.

  What would my other children think if they knew all this? Would they revise their opinions about the cynical, worldly old martinet they take their father to be? Probably not. Their imaginations are incapable of stretching beyond the point of seeing it as the squalid, clandestine infatuation of a man at the dangerous age for an enticing young bitch.

  If Graham could convince me that he has a heart—not like his mother’s, that would be too much to ask—but one capable of an infatuation for something outside himself, I would not mind so much. If he could be possessed by something, as I was possessed by her, and risk everything for it: something positive, not this cold and vicious obsession with getting his own back: then there might be hope for him, and if he killed me, I should not have died in vain. But this feeling for his mother he has worked up—I just don’t believe in it. He’s out for Number One every time: it’s himself, not Millie, that makes him vindictive.

  Of course, I’ve been blind. I’ve distorted my vision by trying to see Millie in him, recreate her through him. Otherwise, I’d have recognised the psychopath years ago. Too late now.

  Lounging in that chair, his legs over the arm of it, watching me writhe in my very soul when he told me all about his mother’s last days—how he enjoyed it, the young brute! And then the threats: not open, but devious, allusive, the torturer’s cat-and-mouse game. Not blackmail, I’ll give him that. No suggestion of your money or your reputation. I found the melodrama palling on me pretty quickly, and asked him point-blank, “Is your intention to murder me, then?” He pursed his little mouth in that calculating, savouring way, and replied, “You don’t deserve to live, do you? You can’t want to live, after what I’ve told you. Well, I don’t think you have much longer to live—Father.” Then he smiled at me and went out.

  What am I to do? Too tired to write more now, let alone see my way straight. I’ll write some more to-morrow perhaps. If I am alive to-morrow. . . .

  So there it is. He intends to kill me. And I must let him kill me. I’ve slept on it, and that is my conclusion. I owe it to him—or rather, to her.

  I hope, when the time comes (to-night? to-morrow? next week?), I shall have the resolution not to resist—life-and-death scuffles are so ignominious. But shall I? Interesting. Mind over matter; and in my experience matter wins every time.

  It all depends how, I dare say. Poison? Enough lethal drugs in the dispensary to put down half my patients. No doubt he’d li
ke to see me expire—justice must be seen to be done—an eye for an eye—that’s our Jewish blood. But, since he does not know that I intend to go like a lamb to the slaughter, he’d be afraid of my denouncing him in extremis.

  What then? Bullet, knife, strangling, gas, blunt instrument, a strong push into the river? There are so many possibilities I must be on my guard not to guard against.

  Knowing him, I know it will be something cold and cunning. Yes, and apt—the punishment fitting the crime: the emotionally retarded, immaturable sort of mind works in that sort of adolescent symbolism. Crude. The poetry of the primitive, the poetic justice of the child.

  Oh, my child, our child.

  Should I appeal to him—not to his heart—he has none now, where I am concerned—but to his self-interest? It would be total humiliation; but worse, a humiliation in vain, for he is implacable. It’s not merely what he said. It’s how he said it, how he looked: I am not the best diagnostician in S.E. London for nothing, I have always known mortal illness when I saw it—a man’s death first lifting up its little worm’s head within him; and now I know the look of a man set upon another’s death—the look which only his victim sees, and which so many victims fail to recognise.

  Self-interest! He has only one self-interest. A monomania. To destroy me. Let him.

  Thou shalt not be killed, but needs’t not strive

  Officiously to stay alive.

  Yes, that’s all very amusing and intrepid. But the morality of it? Do I consider it a good thing, in the interests of justice—personal justice as between him and me—to let him become, through my own passivity, a murderer? Ought I not to protect him from himself by protecting myself from him? A nice point in ethics.

  If one believed in the soul, in eternal damnation, there would be no problem. But I do not.

  If I loved him, love might tell me the right answer. But evidently I do not: it’s what he represents for me—there’s the bond, the beautiful, ingrown, paralysing bond.