Death’s Old Sweet Song

by Jonathan Stagge

  George Raynor said rather anxiously: “Perhaps we should go and find them, Miss Drummond, before it gets quite dark.”

  George Raynor was childless himself, a condition, due, no doubt, to his wife’s decision that no domestic responsibilities should curb her free soul. And he was the only person in Skipton who seemed to have the slightest affection for the White twins.

  Love Drummond got up from Renton Forbes’s coat with a sigh. “I suppose you’re right.” She glanced at Dr. Jessup. “You’d better come too, Hilary. They’ve never shown any respect for your cloth yet, but you may be able to help.”

  The three of them disappeared into the woods. We could hear their voices growing fainter as they called: Bobby. Billy. They had been gone several minutes when Renton Forbes, slipping into his jacket, said:

  “Maybe they need help.”

  But before he left the clearing the air was rent with the familiar, jeering yells and Bobby and Billy came tumbling toward us with George Raynor, Love Drummond, and the Reverend Jessup in their wake.

  “We’ve been playing marbles,” announced Billy.

  “Lovely fat red marbles,” announced Bobby. “I licked Billy at marbles.”

  “Didn’t, either.”

  “Did so.”

  “Didn’t, either.”

  “Did so.”

  Billy hurled himself on Renton Forbes, who happened to be nearest, shouting: “I pushed Bobby into the sawdust pile. I killed Bobby deader’n dead.”

  Bobby, more romantic, had scurried to Dawn and, crouching down at her side, his red hair blazing in the dim light, was slipping something into her hand.

  Then, chanting: “Dawn needs a man to keep her warm,” he bolted away again and began to struggle ferociously with his twin.

  During the half-anxious minutes of our wait for the White boys, darkness had almost entirely engulfed the clearing. Part of the darkness was caused by the storm clouds. As Phoebe, Lorie, and I scurried around groping for the last dishes to pack in the picnic baskets, the rain began. It was not a violent downpour but steady and chilling. Clucks and little cries of disgust rose from the party. Love Drummond called for a flashlight, and Lorie had to admit she had not thought to bring one. Ernesta would have known how to make this small predicament amusing, but Ernesta wasn’t there, with the result that mild panic ensued.

  Panic, of course, was too strong a word. Disorganization is more accurate. As the rain strengthened and the last pale strip of sky over the valley vanished, everyone started his or her own aimless, independent way down the steep, overgrown mountainside.

  Lorie was one of the first to melt away. I saw George Raynor lumbering after her with one of the picnic baskets, and Phoebe, picking up Lorie’s abandoned guitar case, started in pursuit, calling ineffectual advice. I picked up the second basket and, shouting for Dawn, made my way to the mouth of the trail up which we had ascended the hill.

  Dawn answered my call. Soon I felt her small body bumping against mine, and together we started down the track. Once I had my bearings in the darkness, the descent was relatively easy. But none of the others seemed to have hit the trail. I could hear confused shouts and exclamations at relative distances from us in the shrubby areas around and behind us. I called to give them the position of the trail, but they were all either too confused or too wet and cross to pay me any attention. Soon Dawn and I seemed to have outstripped them all.

  My daughter, who always enjoys minor disasters, was thoroughly happy.

  “Miss Drummond will get her rheumatism back and Dr. Jessup will wheeze and Avril will ruin her silly old dress,” she announced with a faint giggle. “Daddy, isn’t this fun? You can’t see an inch in front of your nose.” Spluttering slightly from the rain, she started to sing:

  “Eight for the April rainers.”

  After a moment of contented silence she said: “I think Bobby White really does love me, because he gave me a big red marble and said it was an engagement ring.”

  “He did?” I said. “And you accepted it?”

  “Of course.” Dawn sounded superior. “It would have hurt his feelings to refuse. Boys are very sensitive at that age.” She added smugly: “Besides he is rather naughty, Daddy, and I think a little feminine influence would have a sobering effect.”

  Knowing how fiendish my daughter could be herself at the advanced age of twelve, I greeted this remark with some cynicism.

  Around us I could hear vague sounds which told me the rest of the party was still stumbling down the mountain. But suddenly I heard a sound that was not so faint. It was the rapid thump of running feet coming toward us from the left. There was something dimly alarming about the quickness of the footsteps, because I knew the ground there was rough and treacherous. Someone was either eager enough or frightened enough to be speeding through that rainy darkness without thought of a possible fall or a sprained ankle.

  Dawn and I had both instinctively stopped. The footsteps pounded nearer, and I called:

  “Who is it?”

  The footsteps stopped dead, very close. I could even hear harsh, jerky breathing.

  “Who is it?” I called again.

  A figure appeared at our side. I could trace the vague gleam of bare arms and legs and, to my astonishment, I recognized the runner as Caleb Stone.

  “It’s you, Dr. Westlake, isn’t it?”

  “Sure. What’s the trouble? Something wrong?”

  “N-no.” His voice was tentative at first and then angry. “No. Why should anything be wrong?”

  “You were running as if all the six proud walkers were after you.”

  “I was? I …” His voice faded. His hand groped through the darkness and, finding my arm, clung to it hungrily. His grip reminded me absurdly of a little child clutching its parent for safety in the dark. His fingers were shaking too. He tried to laugh but got nowhere with it, and when he spoke again his voice was rasping, almost out of control.

  “There’s your war hero for you, Doctor. Sure, I was running because I’m scared. I’m scared of the dark.” Bitterness welled up in his tone. “Tough guy, aren’t I? It hit me this way after the last nights on Okinawa. At first in the hospital I used to scream all night. I guess they fixed me up pretty good. But sometimes, even now—” He broke off, adding, almost humble: “Mind if I walk the rest of the way with you?”

  “Sure, come on.”

  I didn’t carry his pathetic confession any further. I knew he was young enough to torment himself that this perfectly normal battle psychosis was the result of weakness in his own character, and I didn’t want to twist the knife any deeper in his wound. Dawn too, thank heavens, had enough sense to keep quiet.

  Caleb didn’t speak until the lights of the Bray house glistened ahead of us through the rain. Then he said gruffly:

  “You won’t tell anyone, will you? I mean, I kind of wish …”

  “Of course I won’t if you don’t want me to.”

  I could see his face now, very young and strained. He gave me an embarrassed smile and strode ahead toward the light. When Dawn and I reached the shelter of the terrace, shaking the rain off our shoulders and hair, there was no sign of him.

  There was no sign of the others, either. But one by one they started to stumble, drenched and complaining, onto the terrace. Renton Forbes and Avril came first. Renton had unbuttoned his jacket and had tucked Avril’s tiny little body under it too. Normally, this degree of intimacy with a man would have started her excited silvery laugh tinkling. But there was no tinkling laughter now. I understood the reason when Avril came under the light. The curl had deserted her auburn hair, which clung lank and faintly metallic around her face. Some of the delicate mauve shadow under her eyes had streaked across her cheek, and the skirt of her peasant costume flopped clammily around her legs.

  She no longer looked dainty, and certainly she no longer looked nineteen.

  “Oh, the wetness!” She managed one unconvincing squeaky giggle and ran off to the comfort of the nearest bathroom.

 
; Love Drummond came next, muttering and stamping her feet. Soon George Raynor appeared with the other picnic basket and Phoebe close behind him, pretending she had enjoyed the murky trip in an attempt to justify her unfortunate choice of a picnic ground. Lorie slipped in next. And, after her, the Reverend Jessup, whose soaked clerical black made him look like a wet, sulky crow.

  Phoebe sent Lorie scuttling for a bottle of brandy to warm everyone, and jiggers of it had been passed round before Love exclaimed:

  “The twins! Bobby and Billy—what’s happened to them?”

  That was the first moment I realized that the whole party had returned except for the White boys.

  Love crossed to the edge of the terrace and called: “Bobby—Billy.”

  Her voice echoed eerily out through the rain-swept darkness, but there were no answering cries.

  Love turned to Dr. Jessup. “Hilary, I thought you were bringing them down.”

  The Reverend Jessup sniffed and said irritably: “My dear Love, you gave me no such instructions. I assumed you had them under your wing.”

  Avril, some of the ravages of the storm repaired, appeared in the doorway from the living room and exclaimed:

  “Oh, the little naughtinesses! I expect they’ve run back to the sawmill.”

  Love called: “Bobby—Billy” again. Some of the others joined the cry, grouping around her heavy-hipped figure at the edge of the porch.

  Renton Forbes growled: “I know we’d all as lief have them devoured by wolves, but we’d better start a search party. Have any flashlights, Lorie?”

  “Yes.” Lorie darted off.

  In a few moments they were all crowding out again into the rain. I would have joined them, but Dawn sneezed at that moment. She was still recovering from a recent mastoid operation, which had been the principal reason for my decision to have a brief vacation from Kenmore in Skipton. I had wanted to give the convalescent a change of scene. Now the sneeze made me more worried for Dawn than the White twins and, promising to join the search on my return, I borrowed a raincoat from Lorie, wrapped it around Dawn, and hurried off down the drive towards home.

  By the time we reached Phoebe’s modest house, which stood on Skipton’s single road at the foot of Ernesta’s drive, the rain had stopped. There was only a short trip to the house belonging to my old friend Dr. Stokes which I had rented for the two months of our stay. We passed the Raynors’ house on the left, Love Drummond’s immaculate cottage on the right, and the white, delicately steepled church at whose side Dr. Jessup’s rectory nestled in a semicircle of elms. Our house stood across the street from the rectory, and, as I bundled Dawn into it, the faint, thumping strains of an orchestra trailed from the Community House farther down the street, where Skipton’s villagers—as opposed to Ernesta’s “our type of people”—were frolicking through their regular Saturday night square dance.

  The wheezing fiddles and the half-audible shouts of the caller gave the night a certain festive quality. I could still hear the music as I rushed Dawn into a hot bath, saw her safely in bed, and, with stern adjurations to stay there, kissed her good night.

  As I left her, Hamish, our gloomy Scotch terrier, lumbered into the room and jumped into his privileged if unhygienic sleeping place against her pillow.

  I was tired and wet myself and had very little desire to return to the Bray house and the search party. But, after a gulped highball, I found that my conscience was still nagging me, so I got a raincoat and a flashlight and hurried back up the street to the dim, clod-hopping strains of “Oh, my darling Nellie Gray” from the Community House. The storm clouds were dispersing as I started up the Bray drive, and a watery moon poured down a thin strain of light.

  I found Lorie, Avril, and Caleb in the Bray living room. Lorie was standing stiffly at the window staring out. Avril was on a couch close to Caleb, who had put on a turtle-necked sweater and blue jeans.

  Without turning from the window, Lorie announced that the search party was still out, adding sarcastically that Caleb had been too lazy to join them.

  From Caleb’s quick, hurt glance at me I could tell that he had not confided his morbid fear of the dark to his cousin and that his pride was suffering badly from this taunt for which he had no reply. To make matters worse, Avril, flirtatious again, nuzzled against him and exclaimed:

  “Caleb’s not lazy. He just knew someone had to keep poor little me company.”

  I was glad that my intention of joining the search gave me an excuse to leave immediately. As I stepped out onto the terrace, Lorie called:

  “They’ll most of them be up by the sawmill. Try the other trail past the duckpond. The twins might easily have taken that by mistake.”

  I knew the Bray estate fairly well, and the moonlight was strong enough now to make my flashlight unnecessary. I went through the formal gardens and took a path through a dark pine copse which Ernesta’s landscape gardener had thinned and made into a feature. Beyond it a dirt track passed between two meadows, winging up the flank of the mountain toward the rear of the old sawmill.

  Ahead of me, echoing down the dark slope, came an occasional call of “Billy … Bobby,” telling me that the other searchers were still on the job. There is always something forlorn and rather ominous about a human voice calling at night. But I was not seriously worried about the White twins. In the past they had thought out methods, infinitely more diabolical than pretending to be lost, to torment the community in general. The ground was wet underfoot. I was most conscious of my soaked shoes, a general exasperation, and a certain concern over Caleb. I liked him and I liked Lorie. I didn’t like the tension between them or Avril Lane’s idiotic flirtatiousness.

  Rough hedges of chokecherry and shadbush fringed the track. The moonlight cast their shadows in bizarre patterns across silvered gravel at my feet. The trail took a sharp turn to the left, and the hedge dropped away, revealing the gleaming surface of the old pond which had been used as a duckpond in the pre-Ernesta days when the Bray house had been a working farm. A shift in wind or a trick of acoustics suddenly brought me the music of the square dance from the village below. Quirkishly, almost as if he were at my elbow, I heard the rough voice of the caller, singing:

  “Swing with your own

  And leave her alone

  And swing with the gay caballero.

  And when you have done

  Go back where you belong

  And swing with your Honolulu baby.”

  By contrast that gay, bouncy music seemed to make the stillness around me more forlorn than had the voices calling from the mountain. I was abreast of the pond now. No one had paid it any attention in years, and tall reeds had grown up, clogging its margin. Each individual reed was etched stiffly in the moonlight, and as I looked at them I stopped hearing the rustic music from the village and, in its place, a snatch from Lorie’s ballad repeated itself naggingly in my mind.

  “I’ll sing you one-O,

  Green grow the rushes-O.”

  The rushes didn’t look green here, though. They looked black. I paused a moment, gazing pointlessly over the unruffled surface of the pond. Suddenly, the way those things do, the frivolous and rather unfortunate remark I had made about the White twins earlier that evening came back to me:

  They should be hit on the head and drowned in the Brays’ duckpond:

  And, as I thought about it and regretted having said it, something pale in the water beyond the rushes caught my eye. I let my gaze rest on it idly at first and then with a prickling of attention. Down in the village the fiddles were scraping, the piano was thumping, the caller was singing:

  “Go back where you belong

  And swing with your Honolulu baby.”

  I still stared at the thing in the pond, and horror started to stir in my stomach like a snake uncurling. I lifted my flashlight. I aimed it directly at that shadowy object and snapped on its switch.

  The beam of light, cutting through the frame of reeds, revealed a small, green-clad arm and a little white hand thrust u
p from the surface of the water.

  The snake seemed to be writhing through me now. I plunged through the rushes into the water, my feet sinking into the cold mud of the pond’s bottom.

  My teeth chattering, I pointed the beam of the flashlight downward. The water was not deep. Beneath it, beneath the arm, I could trace the faint gleam of a face. And then, almost more terrible, I saw another arm in the water, six feet away.

  The jangle of the music from the village blared on. I was conscious of it. But the tune seemed to have changed. In my mind, no one was swinging their Honolulu baby any more. In my mind, the voice seemed to be chanting:

  “Two, two the lily-white boys,

  Clothed all in green-O.”

  Plunging my arms into the water, I picked up one of the little boys and rushed with him to the bank. For a second time I stumbled into the pond, lifted the other cold, unyielding body and laid him down on the bank next to his brother.

  I was too basically shocked to think, but the doctor in me was working automatically. My trembling fingers could find a pulse in neither of their wrists. Instinctively I turned both the small bodies, in their pitiful sodden green play suits, over on their backs. But before I started artificial respiration I saw something that brought the horror to its climax.

  I had been almost sure from the start that the White twins were dead. But there are ways and ways to die. Dimly I had pictured them losing their way, tumbling into the pond and drowning. But I knew now that there had been no accidental tumbling into that pond. For on the back of both of their heads was a crude, matted wound where they had been struck savagely by some lethal weapon.

  I started to work on them because in those first moments I could think of nothing else to do.

  But, as I did so, it seemed horribly that Dawn was still at my elbow, giggling and singing:

  “Two, two the horrid White boys,

  Clothed all in green-O.

  Hit them, hit them on the head

  And throw them in the pond-O.”