Malice in Wonderland

by Nicholas Blake

  “That’s all very well,” Paul tried to turn it off lightly. “But I’ve got a trespassing-phobia. I——”

  “Oh, come on. He doesn’t own the wood. Anyway, all these people tramping around are sure to have driven him off.”

  Sally vaulted the stone wall, crossed the road and entered the wood, Paul following stiffly behind her. The wood, as is the way of woods, closed at once behind them—enclosed them in a silence which had become more profound yet queerly attentive, as though forces lurked there—neutral at present—but ready any moment to take offence and action. Paul was obsessed by a feeling that this had happened before, or was going to happen again. Each leaf, each sun-dappled space of the wood’s floor, concealed an obscure threat. The silence here was so eternal that past and future seemed to have no meaning: you felt compelled to challenge the silence by breaking more noisily through the tangle of undergrowth and whippy branches across the path. Pausing, her hand on his shoulder, to let him unfasten a bramble shoot that had hooked her jersey, Sally said:

  “You’re pale. I believe you really are windy.” Her voice was childish: not contemptuous; purely inquisitive.

  “I hate trespassing,” he answered stubbornly.

  The wood was much larger than they had imagined. Little, overgrown paths hatched and cross-hatched it. You could walk for ever without finding what you wanted. A pulpy, acrid smell of vegetation rose all round them as they peered into the wood’s dark recesses: the play of sunlight and shadow deluded them, creating a dozen mirages that might have been the hermit’s camouflaged home.

  “Oh, I’m sinking in!” the girl cried suddenly. Paul reached out, took her under the arms, and lifted her out of the patch of black mud.

  “It’s a bog. You should look where you’re going,” he said irritably, feeling the tremor of her body as she leant against him for a moment.

  “Look, Paul! Look!”

  She was pointing towards the farther edge of the bog, where a footprint—not hers—was plainly evident.

  “That’s him,” she said. “We can’t be far away now. I’m going to jump across.”

  “I’ll carry you. Or perhaps we can find a way round.”

  “Would you like to carry me, Paul Pry?” she said in that childish voice. “We’d both sink in together, and nothing of us would be left but two poor little top-knots. Wouldn’t it be romantic?”

  “It’d be loathsome. You’d better jump.”

  They both leaped across the intervening bog. Sally whispered:

  “Isn’t it exciting! I’ve always wanted to be in the Secret Service. A beautiful female agent, like Mata Hari. Look, there’s a bit of mud he left behind. And the ferns are bruised here—this is the way.”

  A few moments later they emerged into a tiny clearing. A shack stood there, weather-worn, chinks stuffed with paper, its tattered roofing of tarred felt crowned by a piece of stove-pipe stuck out at a drunken angle like the clay pipe from a stage Irishman’s hat. Now they had found it, it did not seem sinister—only shabby and rather pathetic. Though there was no evidence that the recluse was not at home, Sally walked round to the front of the shack without hesitation and peered in at the single, broken-paned window.

  It was too dark. They could see nothing. Sally tried the door, expecting it to be locked, but it creaked open at once.

  “There you are,” said Paul, irritable with relief. “If he had any guilty secrets, he’d be certain to keep that door locked. Now we can go home, thank God.”

  “Not yet. Keep guard, if you’re afraid to come in.”

  Paul stood beside the doorway, one eye apprehensively on the wood, glancing from time to time at Sally, who was rummaging amongst the rag-and-sack bed, the old newspapers, the rusty cooking utensils that ministered to the simple-lifer’s life.

  “It’s no good. I can’t find anything. Phoo, they’re smelly!”

  “Now perhaps you’ll be satisfied.”

  “Don’t be a wet blanket!” Sally looked quickly round the cabin. There seemed no possible hiding-place. Unless—— She poked her hand up into the cavity in the roof that held the stove-pipe. Her hand came out again, sooty and empty. In reaching up she had stood tiptoe on the earthen floor, just where it was blackened in a circle by the mark of many fires. It took her a few seconds to realise that the floor had a different feel just here. Then she was on her knees, scrabbling amongst the litter of ashes, feeling the hidden bricks that made a firm fireplace beneath, lifting out the bricks, lifting out something that lay beneath them.

  She took it towards the light. Paul was peering uneasily at her. It was a metal box. She opened it, pulled out a sheaf of yellowed press cuttings: they were reports from the local paper of the controversy that had been waged over the Wonderland holiday camp. Impatiently she flipped through them. They told her nothing she did not know already. But the last cutting seemed very fat, and when she shook it out a number of photographs fell from it.

  “Look, Paul,” she said, “look!”

  They were aerial photographs, and one of them presented—in clear and sunlit detail—the buildings, the grounds, the whole lay-out of Wonderland.

  VIII

  “NO,” SALLY WAS saying a minute later. “We must put them back exactly as we found them. Otherwise he’ll be on his guard.”

  It was she now who showed anxiety, as though that photograph of Wonderland had brought another picture too clearly before her eyes—the picture of a grey-bearded man already plodding towards them through the wood, a Mad Hatter full of malice. She put the metal box in the cavity, carefully laid the bricks over it and covered them again with the ashes and charred sticks.

  “‘Exactly as we found them’?” asked Paul. “What about those photographs? Are they wrapped up in the right order?”

  “Oh hell! I don’t know—they all tumbled out—let’s hope he doesn’t notice it. Come on, Paul, I’ve got the jitters.”

  She gave the shack a last look round. Closing its door, they plunged back into the wood. Sally took his hand: hers was blackened from the chimney and sooty ashes, cold even in the midsummer heat.

  “Oh God, I hope we get out of the wood without meeting him.”

  “What’s come over you, Sally? He wouldn’t—ssh!”

  A strange, rusty, tuneless humming sounded through the trees. The pair were frozen still, on the edge of the boggy patch: they dared not move; if they turned off the path into the undergrowth, the noise would betray their flight. This is what the rabbit feels like, thought Paul, as the ragged, grey-bearded figure, bent under a heavy sack, humming like a rusty clockwork, advanced upon them. Now they were confronting each other. At least, the bog was between them.

  “Good afternoon,” said Sally, a little tremulously, holding her dirty hands behind her back.

  “Who are you? Where have you come from? This wood is private, don’t you understand?”

  The voice was soft, yet harsh. His words came out reluctantly, as though the recluse had lost the habit of human speech. The dark, smoked glasses over the grey beard gave him the unnatural aspect of an effigy that children have strung together out of oddments from a cobwebbed attic.

  “We got lost,” said Sally. “Can you tell us the quickest way back to the camp, please?”

  “The holiday camp?” That halting, unused voice rose to a sort of crow’s croaking. “You come from the camp? Get out of here! Get out, I tell you!”

  “We will, if you’ll let us pass.”

  Sally made a move, as if to jump across the bog. It seemed to infuriate the old scarecrow still more. He released his sack and, with a rather dreadful animation, began flapping his arms and making little runs at them, stopping short on the bog’s margin each time. Sally could not stand any more of this: that crow’s voice, those flapping black arms—there seemed no reason why he shouldn’t leave the ground and flap across the bog at them. She turned and fled back up the path, Paul close behind her …

  The treasure-hunt was not yet over when they returned to Wonderland. Sally had bee
n unusually silent on the way back, and her silence seemed to convey to him that he had been inadequate, a disappointment.

  “Well, What could we have done?” he said at last. “Arrested him on the spot? We haven’t proved anything yet.”

  “You needn’t have run away like that.”

  “You ran away too.”

  “That’s different.”

  “I see. Women and children first. I ought to have fought a rearguard action, I suppose? And you ought to have brought your Teddy Wise with you, if you wanted a nice, story-book hero on the spot,” Paul replied bitterly.

  “Oh, let it go, let it go.”

  It was with considerable relief that he narrated the episode to Esmeralda Jones, whom he found in the manager’s office. Here was a woman who didn’t regulate her life by the canons of behaviour laid down in twopenny library romances: a sophisticated, intelligent woman, definitely his type.

  “That photograph of the camp is suggestive, of course,” he said, encouraged by her sober attention and dispassionate gaze. “And he did look rather—well, rather disguised: the beard might have been a false one, but all beards look false nowadays. Anyway, he obviously can’t haunt the camp in those frightful rags he was wearing, and we didn’t find any other clothes in the shack.”

  “He might easily have a cache somewhere else, Paul. No, I think we should go into this thoroughly: you can’t get away from it—he’s got by far the best motive we’ve struck so far.”

  “Who has?” asked Captain Wise, entering with a sheaf of papers under his arm, his brother behind him.

  Paul told them the gist of the story, adding— “the tricks played so far certainly seem in character with a half-crazed, spiteful, rather childish old man, but I still think——”

  “It’d be a good thing for us if these tricks turned out to be engineered by someone outside the camp, don’t you think, Miss Jones? I wonder could we let drop a few hints pointing that way. It’d revive the esprit-de-corps a bit.”

  “Are the visitors beginning to check out, then?” asked Paul.

  “There’s no real exodus started yet,” Captain Wise replied evasively. “Oh, by the way, the Mad Hatter has filled in a questionnaire paper.”

  “What?” Paul exclaimed.

  Captain Wise passed one of the sheets over to him. It was signed, in block capitals, “THE MAD HATTER,” and he had answered the questionnaire in a lamentably frivolous manner: as for example:

  Q. vi I am Trotsky in disguise.

  Q. vii Makes things more exciting, of course, you silly chumps.

  Q. viii Call in the military, the British navy, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Old Moore if you like, but it won’t do you any good.

  Q. ix Kidnap Miss Jones.

  “Not sure he isn’t right there,” said Captain Wise, laying a finger on this last item. “Can’t imagine anything that’d disorganise the camp more. We’d better give you a bodyguard, Miss Jones.”

  “You’re not taking this seriously, are you?” Paul asked.

  “Bless your heart, no. As it happens, three different people have replied over the name of the Mad Hatter. That sort of joke’s contagious.”

  Teddy Wise who, resplendent in white flannels, had been sitting on his brother’s desk juggling with a paper-weight, an india-rubber and a golf ball, swivelled round quickly.

  “‘Contagious.’ There you are. That’s just what I’ve been telling you all along. Some bird plays a practical joke. A lot of to-do is made about it. Several other birds—neurotic, I suppose you’d call ’em—feel they have to compete too. Like those slashings up in Yorkshire a few years ago. Chap slashes a wench—probably got a very good reason for it: then several other chaps hear, the call independently and sharpen up their razors and totter around slashing out right and left quite regardless.”

  Captain Wise tapped his teeth with his gold pencil, gazing at Paul: “What d’you think of that theory, Perry?”

  “I’m not sure,” Paul replied slowly. “I suppose the flaw is that it was announced over the loud-speakers and then a notice put up on the board. That suggests a single individual behind the jokes.”

  “I know I’m not awfully bright,” said Teddy; “but who does it? The loud-speaker Johnny does the duckings and the first treacle act——”

  “And somebody else, happening to have a tin of treacle by him, decides to doctor the piano?” said Miss Jones ironically.

  “Oh well, chap A does the piano as well as the tennis-balls. Then chap B weighs in with strychnine——”

  “Of which, by a fortunate coincidence, he happens to have brought a supply in his suitcase.”

  “All right, all right, all right. I resign.” At the door Teddy Wise halted a moment. “I say. If the hermit is the Mad Hatter, and if he suspects Miss Thistlethwaite and Perry here of having got the drop on him—well, it won’t be too good for the wench, will it?”

  “You’d better run along and guard her then, Teddy,” said his brother abstractedly. “Tell the staff to keep a special lookout for unauthorised people in the grounds. Especially for an oldish man, not wearing a beard, with a harsh voice——”

  “—And otherwise answering to the description of Hermann the Hermit. O.K., boss, we’ll set the mighty organisation to work.”

  “Miss Jones and I have been through these questionnaires,” said Captain Wise as if there had been no comic interlude. “If you’d like to take ’em off now—Fertile imaginations, some of these people have.”

  “Shall I have tea sent to your chalet straight away?” Miss Jones inquired with a demure glance.

  “Thanks very much.”

  Back in his room, Paul began to collate in a note-book the answers to the first part of the questionnaire. Voices of returned treasure-hunters came to his ears:

  “I got ever so dirty, trying to——”

  “Did you have the flag-pole clue, too? I don’t know how they think of them.…”

  “It wasn’t fair. Gertie and Bob had a much easier …”

  “Well, somebody had to win it.…”

  “My friend got stung by something.”

  “Adder, I expect. She was stung by an adder, which made her much sadder, and——”

  “Give over, do, that’s me you’re pinching.…”

  “Sally went off with that Mass Observer gentleman. D’you think——?”

  Presently the last voice died away, and Paul could work without interruption. After an hour, the results of the first five questions were tabulated. Three hundred and seventy-one papers had been returned, a very fair proportion considering the distractions the visitors had had. Paul sat back and reviewed the results. He noted with special interest that they had voted in almost equal proportions for gregariousness, luxury and cheapness, and novelty, as the reason for preferring a holiday camp to lodgings at an ordinary resort; that only 39 % believed that the luxury of Wonderland would dissatisfy them with their normal environment; that only 11% ever felt a desire for solitude, whereas 83% approved of the extent to which their recreations were organised in Wonderland.

  For once, though, he found it difficult to concentrate on statistics. An unaccountable depression, a vague dissatisfaction overcast his mind: these percentages, these carefully worked out plans of investigation—they seemed now a grasping of the shadow and missing of the substance. Yet what substance was there in this unreal microcosm that lay about him? How could you map out a life so fluid, so erratic? In this camp there were five hundred people: they did not stay long enough to form special habits; each of them was a particle, drifting from one recreation to another, forming up with one group of particles, then as lightly detaching itself and drifting towards a second. The older people, and those who had brought families of children, did stick together more consistently: but for the majority the camp was like a huge children’s party where you romped incuriously with anyone and everyone, often not even knowing the names of your playmates of the moment, your games organised and benevolently supervised by a few rather shadowy grow
n-ups.

  It was this, Paul realised, which rendered so difficult not only his own research but the management’s efforts to lay their hand on the Mad Hatter. A feeling of impatience, of contempt almost, for the raw material of his study came over him. Such a feeling, he knew, was deadly sin for an Observer: and besides, though he would reject with contumely “organised games” in the public-school sense, he approved of them theoretically when he could see them as “mass recreation” in a holiday camp. Yet the feeling of impatience persisted. There was that puritan hidden deep within him, which was exacerbated by the spectacle of so many people irresponsibly enjoying themselves. At first he had liked the sensation of being outside it all—the impartial, detached, observing machine. Now, he just felt shut out, a figure prowling resentfully around on the outside of a magic circle.

  There was a knock at the door and Sally Thistlethwaite entered.

  “Hallo,” she said, peering with frank curiosity at his note-books. “The great man at work.”

  “Hallo.”

  “What’s the matter? Your face is as long as a wet week. Come and play something.”

  “I’m busy.”

  “That means you’re expecting the Jones along, I suppose.”

  “You can suppose what you like.”

  “Won’t his home-work come out right then?” she said, peering over his shoulder.

  “Don’t be so childish.”

  Sally went out at once, slamming the door behind her. He could hear her calling out to Teddy Wise. A moment’s irrational panic seized him: they were both coming back to bait him: he remembered things that had happened at school: or perhaps she would set the nit-witted tough on him. He slipped quickly out of his chalet and walked away towards the main building.

  Furious now with himself and everyone else, he wandered through the various playrooms. In one, a table-tennis competition was proceeding: in another, Mr. Thistlethwaite was playing billiards—or rather, with hieratic gestures, blessing a large break on which his opponent was engaged: in a third, several parties of young people were noisily occupied with pin-tables, darts and shove-halfpenny. Paul watched them for a little, vaguely aware that the semi-official position which his questionnaire had given him in the camp somehow kept him outside their circle. They grinned at him, friendly enough, but at the same time their attitude was a little self-conscious—as though he were carrying a portable microphone with him and broadcasting their fun as a feature programme to the world.