One night they broke free. I still have no idea of what happened. I was asleep in my room, having one of those feverish dreams that seemed to mean so little when I woke and analysed them, yet left me feeling uncomfortable and anxious, in a way most nightmares would not. In this dream, I was walking along a country lane, in the middle of summer. The dream was filled with the same oppressive bright heat that filled the waking day: the road was narrow and dark, tall banks of hogweed and nettles grew up around me on either side and I could feel something moving along beside me in the undergrowth. I could feel it, I could even hear it breathing, but I couldn’t see it. I kept trying to make it out in the dark foliage, but whenever I stopped, it vanished, there was no sound, no movement, only the still beds of weeds, sticky with honeydew and cuckoo-spit. Then, finally, I caught a glimpse of it, out of the corner of my eye. It was utterly hideous: an immense damp-haired creature, with a dark, piglike face, and it seemed ready to attack.
A moment later, everything had changed. I was standing in the hall of my own house, but the furniture and pictures I had known all my life had been replaced with ugly knick-knacks and bric-a-brac, of the sort found in junk shops. It was perfectly still, a clear summer’s day. I could smell the flowers in the garden, I could see the sunlight flickering on the polished floor. I walked to the foot of the stairs and stood listening. Upstairs, someone was crying, a woman, or perhaps a child – I couldn’t be sure – and, suddenly, I was afraid. I ran outside, back into the light, and began walking away from the house as quickly as I could. But I had only walked a few yards when I heard someone calling my name and, when I turned back, I saw a woman running towards me, with a letter in her outstretched hand. I could tell from her face that the letter contained bad news and I wanted to call out, to make her stop, but when I opened my mouth, no sound came. As the woman came closer, I saw that her face was a blank, there were no features, no eyes, no mouth, only a mask of white skin.
I woke in the dark. The room was still, but someone else was there. I could feel it; I had that sense of being watched. I sat up quickly and fumbled for the bedside light.
It was the twins. They were standing in the doorway, eight feet away, in their night clothes, bolt upright, as if standing to attention, or perhaps just trying to stay balanced. I had no idea how long they had been there, or how they had escaped from the basement. I was certain I had locked their door before coming upstairs; but there they were, standing side by side, watching me intently. When I switched on the lamp, they didn’t flinch: it was as if they could see as well in the light as the darkness. It was some time before I noticed that they were soaking wet, as if they had just come in from a rainstorm. They seemed very sure of themselves; they did not resemble toddlers at all. They were more like wild animals, silken and wet and attuned to the night, and there was something about them, some latent power, that froze me. I think for a moment I half-expected them to attack, but they did not move; they simply stood in the doorway, staring.
It was a difficult moment. I was aware of the fact that I had been dreaming, that I might have talked or cried out in my sleep. What if they had done this before, if they had come to my room and spied on me, then left without my knowing? I hadn’t found the basement door open, or even unlocked, but in all the time they had been there, I might have left it open without even realising it. If I had made that mistake, I could easily have made any number of others. The one thing that was established, beyond doubt, was that I had allowed them to escape on this one occasion. Where one error is found, you are bound to assume others have gone unnoticed. If they had heard me speak, if they had heard something other than the abstractions on the language tapes, the experiment was finally ruined, and I still had an idea that something could still be salvaged from this experiment. I was conscious of the fact that I had almost cried out, involuntarily, a moment before, when I had caught sight of them standing there, watching me in the dark. I needed to know what they had seen and heard, most of all, I needed to know how they had come to be standing there, soaking wet, on a warm summer’s night. I was horrified by the thought that they might have made their way out into the world somehow, where they would have been discovered. I had a picture of them, in my mind, wandering unsteadily along the road, in the summer moonlight. Yet what troubled me the most was something I hadn’t really registered at first, something that felt like a false memory, and I might have been mistaken but, later, when I recalled switching on the lamp and seeing them there, I was certain that, for the first time ever, in my presence at least, they were smiling.
* * *
With the benefit of hindsight, I see that it was at that point, with that mistake, that the experiment with the twins ended. I couldn’t trust myself any longer; I couldn’t make even the most basic of assumptions. From that day on, whenever I went out, I would worry that I had left the door unlocked and, at that very moment, they were clambering up from the basement, or stumbling out into the light of day, making instinctively for the gate that led to the road. It was absurd, I knew, but whenever I left the house, I would leave the car running in the drive and go back to check, to see if everything was secure. At first it was just the door I checked; then I would stop to be sure I could see them both, safely locked up inside. Then I began to check the whole house: gas, water taps, electrical points. I had fantasies of fire breaking out while I was gone. A kettle had been left on, it had shorted, the fire had begun in the kitchen and swept through the house – it was only a matter of luck that a passer-by had spotted the flames and called the fire brigade who had, in turn, rescued the twins. I had fantasies of flood. At one point, I started going back two or three times to be absolutely certain. Once, in the supermarket, I left my trolley in the frozen food aisle and drove home in the rain, because I was convinced I had left the key to the basement room in the door. When I returned, my trolley was gone.
It was an absurd situation. It wasn’t only that I was concerned the twins might escape. The fact was, their very existence had begun to affect me in all kinds of ways. It’s hard to believe, now, that I was afraid of them, but I was. Whenever I went down to the basement, I felt sick and dizzy, as if I had been poisoned, or I was suffering from an allergy of some kind. I only had to look at the twins, playing together in their pen, to feel a wave of revulsion sweep through my whole body. It was a familiar sensation. I had experienced it before, I knew, and I racked my memory to remember when. Finally, I recalled the day my father found the cat and brought it home, without a word of warning. It was something I would never have expected from him. The small, rather ugly creature he carried into the hall wasn’t even a kitten, it was just a youngish cat he’d picked up from a refuge, one of those cat protection places, where lost and misbegotten creatures end up, like the souls in limbo, waiting to be redeemed. I remember him now, standing in the doorway, with the cat in his arms; he hadn’t even asked for a box, or a cage, he must have just selected it, more or less at random, then picked it up and carried it away.
It was almost Christmas. He had been sitting around in the kitchen for days, waiting for snow and listening to the songs on the radio – ‘White Christmas’, ‘Winter Wonderland’ – the sort of sentimental nonsense Mother couldn’t stand. I can see, looking back, that he must have been going through a crisis of some kind: he appeared more distant and unreal to me than ever, and I vaguely remember an impression I had that he was thinking something through, trying to come to a meaningful conclusion. He kept drifting into the downstairs study, where Mother and I would be sitting, reading, or talking quietly; he would stand at the window and look out for long minutes at a time, then he would say that he wished it would snow. I couldn’t see what difference snow would make, one way or another, but it was evident that it mattered to him. He must have said it a dozen times or more. Maybe he was trying to remember something from his childhood, and he thought snow would help. Most of the time, Mother ignored this performance but, for a while at least, I was a little intrigued.
Finally, a few days
before Christmas, he went out early in the day, and came home around tea-time with a thin, red and white cat. He made a pretence of giving it to me; he said it would do me good to have a pet to make friends with and look after. I stood watching, in utter disbelief, as he released the scrawny, grimy-looking animal into the clean, perfect space of our front hall. Then I turned to Mother. I was certain she would forbid him to keep the cat in the house but, to my surprise, she simply walked slowly upstairs to her own study, without uttering a word. My father seemed not to notice; he took off his coat and led the cat through to the kitchen, where he found a bowl – a bowl for humans, something Mother might have used – and setting it down on the floor, filled it with milk. The cat inched forward cautiously, sniffed at the edge of the bowl, then turned away and began exploring the kitchen, rubbing itself up against every surface, leaving its mark, making our house its own.
‘I suppose he doesn’t want his milk,’ my father said, looking at me kindly, assuming my interest, including me against my will.
‘I suppose not,’ I said, as dryly as I could manage. I couldn’t understand why Mother hadn’t acted. Two words from her, and the cat would have been gone.
‘I’ve got some food in the car,’ my father said. ‘I’ll fetch it.’
He stood a moment, gazing at me. He seemed to expect me to participate, to stroke the cat, or pay it some kind of attention, or perhaps volunteer to feed it. I didn’t say anything. He went back outside, without his coat, and returned a moment later, with a cardboard box full of tinned cat food. He opened one tin, fetched another bowl, then took a fork from the drawer and half-filled the bowl with the dark, foul-smelling meat. When he set the meal on the floor, the cat ran to it immediately and began to feed. That was when I began to feel ill. It started with a knot in my stomach, then dizziness, and I experienced that same sense of personal invasion that comes when you have a stomach bug, or a severe cold. Something from outside – something animal – enters and takes control, depriving your body of its natural autonomy. I was being forced into the most distasteful intimacy. It was evident that my father wanted me to like the cat, that any sign of revulsion on my part would be a rejection, not of the animal, but of him. Yet the longer I stood there, in the warm kitchen, watching this scrawny, somehow parasitic creature eating from Mother’s crockery, the longer I was exposed to the smell, to the sounds it made in feeding, the worse I felt, and I knew, immediately, that I had to do something to protect myself, and Mother, from the consequences of my father’s folly.
Christmas had never been extravagantly observed in our house. Mother disliked sentimentality. My father would buy me several gifts and, on Christmas morning, he would present Mother with a single, discreetly-wrapped package, which she always set aside unopened. I never knew what it was. Generally, however, the whole occasion was over by breakfast-time. Normal order was restored; I put away the toys and books my father had bought me and Mother prepared a light lunch. We did not subscribe to turkey and funny hats, though my parents sometimes had guests on Boxing Day, for drinks, or supper. They always behaved discreetly, omitting any mention of the actual occasion from their conversation, as if they had simply happened over by chance, or on an ordinary invitation.
That year, it was different. We had a large tree, with lights and decorations, and I was perplexed to see Mother taking part, helping my father to dress the tree and hang up decorations, standing in the kitchen, making mince pies and angel cakes. The cat looked on, not quite certain if the occasion was a matter for fear, or for fascination. Though my father claimed he had brought the creature home for me, he was the only one who paid it any attention. He was the one who decided it should be called Rusty, because of its odd colouring; he was the one who fed it and let it out from time to time, standing at the kitchen door to see that it did not stray too far, then going out and calling it in, when he felt it had been outside long enough. Mother had decided to pretend the creature did not exist: I was so convinced of her power that I imagined, for several days, that the animal would sense her rejection and slip away some afternoon, leaving my father at the door, calling out to an empty garden. Instead, Rusty made Mother the central focus of its existence: wherever she went it followed; whenever she appeared, it woke up and went to her, making soft mewing sounds. It must have cost Mother some effort of will to ignore it, but my father, who ought to have been jealous, was pleased.
‘Rusty likes you,’ he would say, grinning at Mother, as if he had just solved a long-term problem, or discovered the answer to a question that had been troubling him for years. Mother wouldn’t answer. She simply kept up the pretence that the cat did not exist, no matter what, even when it tried to jump into her lap, or when it attempted to rub against her legs, smearing her with its scent, making her a piece of its territory. For hours at a time, she would retire to the upstairs study, where the cat was not permitted. It didn’t take long for me to understand that she felt the same sickness at the pit of her stomach, the same slight giddiness that I suffered, whenever the animal was close. For my father’s sake, I didn’t really want to hurt the cat, but in the end I had no choice. For Mother’s sanity, and for my own, I had to do something.
When I returned to school, after that strange Christmas, I found a book about domestic animals in the library. Immediately, I turned to the entry on cats and began a careful study of the subject. I looked at the bone structure, I read about its capacity for night vision, but what I found most interesting, and promising, was the fact that the sense of smell is integral to a cat’s being. I read that every cat had small glands on its body which emitted a uniquely-scented oil, with which the animal would mark its territory, leaving its signature wherever it went. Thus every cat had its own scent, by which it recognised itself; it followed, then, that that scent was its very identity. I was fascinated. For animals, any sense of self they had was defined by something external, by the presence of their body oils on rocks and trees and patches of ground around a given territory. Take away the scent, I reasoned, and the animal was lost. Its own territory, even its body, would become alien and threatening.
The possibilities for experimentation were infinite. It would have been most interesting, for example, if I had been able to substitute one cat’s scent glands for another’s, and observe the results. I could imagine the animal’s confusion, perhaps a kind of madness, as its sense of itself was dissipated – it be would like waking up in a new skin, with a different face, a different body. What would happen, I wondered, if a male’s scent-glands were replaced by a female’s? Would its behaviour change? It was just one of a number of fascinating questions, and I regretted the fact that such an experiment was beyond my capabilities. What I could do, however, was to try to mask Rusty’s natural scent, to remove his sense of identity. That, in itself, would surely be a disorienting experience and it might possibly drive the animal away. I didn’t really want to kill it, to begin with, at least. I was sure, if I could make it leave, someone else would find it and take it in. People are sentimental about cats and dogs, they treat them as they would treat other humans. Better, in fact. They love animals, because animals can be anything you want them to be. They cannot talk.
A few days later, when my father was away on business, I set the experiment in motion. It was a crude affair. I mixed up a cocktail of Mother’s perfumes in an old pump-action rose sprayer, then lured Rusty into the shed. The cat wasn’t suspicious: I had never given it cause to be wary of me, and it was relatively easy to lead it inside and lock the door behind us. I made it think I wanted to play, waving a length of cotton around in front of its nose; then, when I had its confidence, I trailed the cotton into a wooden box, where Mother usually kept plant pots, and eventually managed to trap the animal inside, by covering the box with a large garden sieve and weighting it down. Rusty made no serious attempt to escape; it must have imagined this was part of the game. As I started to administer the spray, it began to panic, but there was no escaping the box, and I had plenty of time to douse it thoro
ughly with the alien scent. I sprayed it several times, trying to cover the whole body, to mask the creature from itself utterly. It occurred to me that, without its scent, a cat might imagine it was invisible. It would be like the experience a human might have, if he looked into a mirror and saw no reflection.
Finally I stepped back, let the sieve fall, and opened the door. The cat scrambled quickly out of the box and fled out into the garden. I had tried to be careful not to spray near the eyes or the mouth, and I was reasonably sure I hadn’t caused any real injury; nevertheless, as soon as it was outside, it began to cry horribly. It sounded like a child crying, as if, somewhere behind that flat, whiskered face, there was a human soul, trapped in the mind and body of an animal. I had read how some peoples believe that souls pass from one form to another after death, how a man could become a dog, or a rabbit, or a horse, depending on the actions of his life, his sins and errors, the moments of kindness and betrayal, the loves and fears he had endured – and maybe it was true, maybe there was a soul trapped in that cat’s body, something more or less human, yet diminished in some way, a form that was somehow degraded, part-instinct, part-consciousness. Maybe that was another reason why some people wanted animals around them; maybe they saw traces of people like themselves in those dumb, appealing eyes. Maybe that was what my father had seen in Rusty. He had caught a glimpse of himself in this pitiful form, and he had reached out to give comfort – to the animal, to himself, to everything that was weak and needy. The idea disgusted me. There is nothing worse, nothing more distasteful than pity. Rusty had wandered away into the far corner of the garden, and was now standing by the pear tree. It was still crying softly to itself, and the sound irritated and enraged me. I shouted at it to stop, but that made no difference. Then, after two or three minutes had passed, and it still had not stopped, I went back into the shed and fetched a spade. The cat didn’t try to escape. I hit it once, then I struck several more times – I can’t remember how many – till I knew it was dead. I hadn’t planned to harm it, but for that one moment, I had no choice; I had to expunge that scrap of living misery, to destroy its pitiful soul. There was something about it that made me sick to the stomach. Even if it had run away, even if I had never seen it again, I couldn’t bear to think of its continued existence.
The Dumb House Page 16