After a few minutes, we were out of the dangerously close alleyways and back on roads paved with cobblestones, though ones that were narrow enough for a boy to spit across.
‘This is the poorest part of the city, where it always rains,’ explained Uncle. ‘Where you always have to look out for yourself, because … Well, never mind. But stay close from now on, won’t you, Daniel?’
I nodded and walked in silence behind him. It always rained here?
He knew what I was thinking. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It always rains; we don’t know why. Now, we’re not far away from your new lodgings, but there’s about enough time for a story, I reckon, if you would like to hear it?’
‘Very much,’ I said, glad for anything that would distract from the pain of pulling the parcel behind me over the stones.
‘Good – this is one I heard just the other day,’ said Uncle. ‘You’ll hear a lot of stories if you spend any time in Tumblewater, but I ought to mention that they’re all horrible, and nasty, and scary. I don’t really know why that is the case, but it is.’
‘But that’s the best kind of story,’ I said. ‘Go on!’
‘Well, good, I will. I call it –’
(Now, I’m going to tell you the story myself, but not word for word how Uncle told it to me, because – well, partly because I don’t suppose you’ll be any the wiser whether I do or not. But also because if I tell this tale – and any of the others that follow it, in fact – in my own voice, and take out the throwaway remarks and the bits where the teller stopped to cough, or went back and repeated the last bit until they could remember what happened next, then we’ll both enjoy it a lot more, I think.)
If you walked along the darkest, dingiest street you could find in Tumblewater, and struggled through its failing light, and ignored the washerwomen throwing dreadful insults as you passed, and stepped over the diseased dogs and overcame the wailing of unattended babies – if, in short, you followed the streets through to the centre of the Old District, you would find yourself at the school.
All of Tumblewater’s children attended school. That is to say, when their parents threw them out of the house each day they all went to the school building to shout and scream for a few hours. It was, after all, a warm and relatively dry place, it seemed less likely to fall down at any moment than most other buildings in the district, and it was populated by only a few teachers who probably could not teach even if they tried. So the children did not mind too much.
It was called the St Windsmuth School for the Underprivileged, and to many of the pupils it must have felt very much like home. There were no books, for instance, either to read or write in. Nor did it have any pens or pencils, or chalk for the teachers to use on the blackboard. That it had desks at all seemed almost lucky.
A young boy called Henry inhabited the furthest corner of the Junior Class. Whereas most little boys place themselves at the back of the class to avoid the teacher’s glare and to get up to unsuitable activities, Henry sat there because in this classroom all the naughty boys (which was everyone apart from Henry) sat at the front, so they could pelt the teacher with whatever objects they had brought from home, found on the way to school or picked up off the classroom floor. Those without physical objects to hurl instead made a very good substitute of the vilest and most horrible language they knew.
‘You stupid idiot!’ shouted Oliver, a portly little snot-nosed boy.
‘Teach us something, you fat pig!’ screamed James, a tall, spotty brat.
Henry hunched at the back of the room, hoping no one would notice that he was reading. He had a secret passion for literature, and his father went without food to provide Henry with books in the hope that his son would educate himself.
One day, after the rest of the class had run from the room at the sound of the church bell, which signalled the end of lessons, the teacher wiped the egg from his glasses and was astounded to find little Henry reading at the back of the room. Reading! And not just any book – Dracula, by Bram Stoker, which was then quite a new book.
‘Do you like that book, Henry?’ he asked.
Henry looked up, astonished. ‘Has class finished?’ he asked. ‘I must get home!’ and with that he took the book and ran out of the room.
The teacher, touched that he had at long last found a boy interested in reading books, went home in his best mood for years. When he got there, he told his wife, who had died of typhus some twenty years before, and whose skeleton he had propped in the chair in one corner, all about his discovery . She said nothing in return, because she was quite dead, but he took her silence to be one of approval and satisfaction.
You see, the unfortunate truth is that many decades of abuse by the vile offspring of the town had driven Mr Pelmettle (for that was the teacher’s name) quite out of his head. So there he sat, chatting to his deceased wife, and wondering how he could best encourage his little protégé, and we cannot be too surprised that the plan he eventually struck upon was a mad one.
Therefore, after his meagre supper (which was the same as it was every day – walnut stew with peas) he set out into the rain and wind to find some way of illustrating the qualities of that excellent story – Bram Stoker’s Dracula – so that it might stick irrevocably in the boy’s mind, and encourage him on to greater things.
Being of a limited circle of acquaintance (or, as one of his repugnant pupils would have put it, a ‘Billy No-Mates’) and also being of an unusually morbid disposition, Mr Pelmettle made for the local graveyard. He had long ago befriended the gravedigger, Mr Grum, and now sought his advice.
‘Mr Grum!’ called Mr Pelmettle when he spied the man, only visible in the dark and flooded graveyard from the waist up. Grum sloshed slowly around to see who was calling him.
‘I see I catch you working, Mr Grum,’ started Mr Pelmettle, a little nervously. ‘The flood is, er, worse than usual?’
‘What do you want?’ asked his friend.
‘Er – ah – I wondered whether you might have any ideas as to where I might find some bats around here.’
Grum stared at him for a moment as though not sure if he had heard him right. Then he pointed with the handle of his shovel towards the bell tower.
‘Up there,’ he said, and turned to continue with his work.
Excited, Mr Pelmettle slipped away to fetch what he needed. A little while later he returned and then climbed to the top of the church steeple with a boathook between his teeth.
Catching the bats took a long time, because bats are wily creatures who see in the dark (also, a boathook is not the ideal instrument to kill them with), and a few times he nearly fell clean out of the church’s belfry. But he kept his balance and eventually he was climbing down the steeple again, with four dead bats in his pockets.
Next he made his way to the slaughterhouse on the east side of Tumblewater, and broke in. He filled several large cider bottles with spare blood, which the slaughterhouse kept in large vats so that it could be turned into delicious black pudding for people’s breakfasts. The sun was nearly up by this time, so instead of returning home he went straight to school.
Unfortunately, it had never occurred to him (or to anyone else) that he might be dangerously mad. He was, though. Utterly. I feel I should stress that once again at this point.
Just as he got to school, the church bell rang down the lane, and the boys began to tumble up the stairs and into the room, armed with their usual arsenal of rusty spikes and horrid insults. Mr Pelmettle assumed his position, cowering behind the lectern at the front, and waited for it all to end. Eventually the second bell came, the boys piled out and Mr Pelmettle poked his head round to see Henry, once more reading at the back of the room.
He stole into the staffroom, which was a forgotten little place at the back of the classroom, not much larger than a cupboard, and put on a long dark cape (which he had fashioned earlier from one of the curtains), poured blood down the front of it and over his face too, and hung the dead bats on the inside of the cloak. The
n he crept back out, stood in front of Henry (who was still immersed in his book), flung the cape back and opened his mouth to let out what he imagined to be an accurate impression of Count Dracula’s mad cackle. But then he saw that the book had changed. The boy was avidly reading a weathered, second-hand copy of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.
‘Frankenstein, is it?’ said Mr Pelmettle, amazed. ‘A fast reader!’
He hadn’t stopped to think about his appearance before he spoke, and as Henry caught sight of him the shock he received lifted him bodily out of the chair and dropped him on the floor six feet away. Speechless with terror, he tore from the classroom before Mr Pelmettle could explain.
That night, Pelmettle put behind him the slight embarrassment of scaring the boy half to death, and settled more determined than ever to the task of encouraging the boy’s reading habits. Finally, after much discussion with his wife, he decided that yesterday’s plan to bring Dracula to life in front of the boy’s eyes, although thwarted, was a sound one, and could be applied to this new book just as effectively. Therefore he set off for the graveyard to see if he could make his own Frankenstein’s monster. Even now, it did not occur to Mr Pelmettle that he was insane, although he was. More so than ever.
When Mr Pelmettle arrived at the graveyard again, and presented Mr Grum with a rather unusual request, the gravedigger replied, ‘Suit yourself. Fresh ones is in the cart,’ and flicked his head towards a wooden vehicle piled up with anonymous victims of the latest plague.
‘I can help myself?’
‘It’ll cost you,’ Grum warned, sloshing back round to work on his grave.
‘Anything!’ called Mr Pelmettle, who went over to the cart and started selecting various body parts – hacking them off with a saw he had brought along specially. When he had what he wanted, he settled up with Mr Grum and walked to school through the driving rain.
All night Mr Pelmettle worked hard, sewing away in the staffroom, and as the sun rose, invisible behind the grey clouds and cold rain, he wiped sweat from his brow and tied the final stitches in his creation. He stood back to admire his work – and was pleased. It didn’t look quite like Frankenstein’s monster, admittedly . He had had to make do with body parts from a dark-skinned hunchback, a buxom serving wench and a young boy who’d had his neck snapped, but overall he felt that the effect was pretty good. The creature kept slumping forward, however, so Pelmettle fitted its ample bosom into an old jacket of his and hung it from a nail to keep it upright. Then he propped its lolling mouth open with a pencil to make it smile (he didn’t want it to be too scary, after all), and stood back to gauge the effect.
‘No,’ he muttered to himself. ‘That just looks weird.’ And he took the pencil out again.
Nevertheless he was sure that Henry would be delighted, and intrigued, and spurred on to read more. When school began, he again sat out the barrage of insults and projectiles, and once the boys had gone at the end of the day, peeped round the lectern to find the room empty .
No Henry? he wondered to himself. Why, the lad has not missed a day’s school in four years. I wonder what can be wrong?
Mr Pelmettle felt very disappointed not to have displayed his Frankenstein’s monster after all the work he had put in and, even more than this, afraid that he might have lost the one good pupil he’d ever had.
So as he stepped out of school, rather than head towards home, he turned down the dark and narrow streets towards the boy’s home. He pulled his cloak around him against the rain and stopped a few times to ask directions from boys loitering on the steps of the houses.
Eventually he stood looking up at a tall deserted building with dark windows. The number was scratched in chalk next to the doorway (from which the door had long ago been ripped) and he noticed that he had not passed a person in some minutes. In fact, there was no human voice to be heard, even distantly, and beyond the patter of rain there was only a deep and unsettling silence.
With some trepidation, Mr Pelmettle made his way in and began to climb the stairs. Not a shred of light leaked under any of the doors, and he had to fumble in the gloom for his way, until he reached the fourth floor. Then in front of him he saw an open door, and inside the flickering of a candle.
It was a one-room apartment with some bare mattresses visible in the far corner. A man sat on the room’s only chair, bent over as though in pain.
Mr Pelmettle knocked lightly on the door.
‘I hope I don’t interrupt?’ he asked. The man stared up at him.
‘This is Henry Smart’s house?’
Still the man gave no reaction.
‘I wish to enquire whether Henry is quite well. I am his tutor, and he was not in class today.’
The man finally spoke with a great effort. ‘I don’t know what I’ve done, sir, to deserve all this. Tell me, sir, what can I have done?’
Mr Pelmettle was aghast. ‘Done, sir? Why, I don’t think you have done anything unless it is to rear the best-behaved and most intelligent boy in my class. Please reassure yourself – he is in no trouble.’
‘He is killed, sir.’
‘Killed? But—’
‘By a carriage, sir. I don’t understand. I brought him up always to be so cautious, and to cross the street with care. But they say he ran out like – like a maniac. As though fleeing from some terrible fright, although I can’t imagine what. He slipped. The wheel snapped his neck in an instant.’
Mr Pelmettle leaned against the wall, unable to speak.
‘But that’s not all, sir. That’s not all. I went to the graveyard where they had sent his body and it was gone. Graverobbers, you see, stole him before he even went into the earth. And now I can’t even say goodbye to my dear boy.’
Mr Smart covered his face, too wrapped up in misery to think about Mr Pelmettle, or even to look at him.
Watching him, the thought finally occurred to Mr Pelmettle that he might, after all, be a little mad.
‘Tell me what I’ve done, sir. Please, tell me what I’ve done!’ Now the man came out of his chair. He could not quite stand straight, and he held his hands forward, beseeching Mr Pelmettle to tell him what he’d done. For every step Mr Smart took towards him Mr Pelmettle took one step backwards, until, still watching the man’s stricken face staring from his own doorway, he retreated from the candlelight and into the darkness.
‘That’s horrible,’ I said to Uncle. He looked at me, worried. ‘I love it!’
‘You do?’ he asked, a little bit pleased in spite of himself.
‘It’s so nasty,’ I said, shivering happily. ‘It’s worse than any story I’ve ever heard.’ I trotted alongside him and begged for another.
‘Maybe some other time,’ he said. ‘But you’ll find no shortage of stories around here. And let me tell you, my boy, you’ll hear worse than that!’
I shivered again, more intensely than before. Stories worse than that? (Or better than that, if you put it another way?) I was desperate to hear them. At that moment Uncle led me round a last corner to a row of tall, tired-looking buildings. Near the end stood a very old-fashioned house – its timbers were warped and twisted with age, and the windows were crooked, like eyes crinkled by a smile. Seeing its harmless and friendly appearance, I knew at once that these were my new lodgings. At the same time, I knew with inexplicable certainty that I would be happy here.
Even though it was the middle of the night by now, chat and laughter could be heard from a few windows above me, and the sound of a guitar playing lazy ballads drifted over our heads.
‘This is a street of night owls,’ said Uncle, and there was fondness in his voice. Strangely he hung back self-consciously as we reached the house and instead of marching up to the door, waited until a skinny, wide-eyed old man on the steps spotted us and ran inside. He returned a second later with a friendly-looking red-haired woman who greeted Uncle happily and introduced herself to me.
‘My name is spelled Nu-ala, to rhyme with koala,’ she said, ‘but in fact it’s pronounced Nooler, t
o rhyme with jeweller. Don’t forget.’
I nodded. Over her shoulder I saw Uncle gulp and nod secretly at me. He had been pronouncing it wrong.
Uncle gave her a ten-second version of my story, and she looked at me with pity.
‘Dear oh dear,’ she said. ‘How awful, Daniel. Come in out of the rain, lad.’ She put an arm round me and kissed me roughly on the ear. As I dropped the untidy ball of possessions at my feet, I realized how tired I was and instead of responding I let out an enormous yawn.
‘So you’ve got a spare room for the boy?’ Uncle asked.
‘I always do, you know that, Uncle,’ she said. ‘You look tired yourself. Why don’t you come in, rather than traipsing all the way back across town?’ He seemed embarrassed by the question and, making his excuses, started to walk away. I ran after him to say thank you.
‘It’s my pleasure – I couldn’t have left you like that, once I’d spotted you,’ he said. ‘We’ll meet again soon, Daniel.’ He shook my hand, and I rejoined Nuala on the top step. She seemed amused, watching Uncle’s thoughtful figure retreat along the street.
‘He’s a funny old stick,’ she said. ‘Did you see how he wouldn’t meet my eye?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But why is that? You seem like old friends.’
‘If I was given to vanity, I’d say it was because he fancies me, Daniel. But seeing as I’m not, I have to say I haven’t the slightest idea. Come on, boy, let’s find you a bed.’
That’s almost the last thing I remember. How I hauled myself and my strange parcel of belongings upstairs, and shut the door, and got into bed, I have no idea. I only know that the most overwhelming wave of delicious tiredness pulled me deep down into the well of sleep without any further thought on my part, except a momentary vision of the huge house I had seen, and the beautiful woman. I saw the sack being pulled over her head again and again as I slipped off to sleep. It haunted me, and I knew I would have to go back to that place. She was part of my story now.
Grisly Tales from Tumblewater Page 3