Grisly Tales from Tumblewater

by Bruno Vincent

  We moved in a fleet of half a dozen stallholders. One of them, seeing me staring at this display of strength, laughed and said – ‘Hop up!’ I almost didn’t believe him but was ready to accept a lift so as he paused for a minute I sat on the edge and felt the huge weight of the barrow buck and roll as he leaned forward.

  One of the men had no barrow of his own – his goods were piled on his friend’s cart – and he walked alongside happily, lighting his pipe and glancing at me.

  ‘You’re from out of town, right?’

  I nodded.

  ‘And you’ve never been here before?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Then you won’t have heard the tale of the Orphan? You being a young lad and seeming all lost reminds me of it,’ he said.

  I’m not that young, I thought, annoyed. But nevertheless I said I’d like to hear it, and as we went through the lanes out of the back of the market towards the home of the costermongers (a word I hadn’t heard before, but he assured me that was the name of their job), he told me that bloodcurdling tale. And that’s how I knew the story I told you at the beginning of this book.

  ‘What do you think?’ he asked as he finished it. I was chilled by the idea that I might have been so close to such a frightening little creature as the Orphan, and felt full of questions.

  ‘But does he know that he’s killing the people? Or is it all a terribly unlucky accident?’ I asked. ‘Does he realize that they die at all? Or is he some sort of ghost who will always be there, disguised as a murderous little boy? Is there any truth in it?’

  Every question seemed to amuse the man more.

  ‘Any truth?’ he responded. ‘Go back up to the crossroads and have a look for yourself.’

  I felt a delicious shiver as I made a strange realization: it didn’t matter if the stories were true or not – I almost didn’t want to know, in case they were true. At that moment we were arriving at a short street of tiny, dirty cottages where there were lots of young children playing. The second they saw the men, they all ran into their houses shouting, ‘They’re back! They’re back!’

  As the men unloaded their goods, I sat on a stool near a brazier in the middle of the street where a fire burned noisily, and warmed my hands. Children came forward to throw bits of kindling over my shoulders now and then, and the men came back out carrying chairs and stools to sit around the fire. Without speaking, the children sat in the gaps between the chairs and on the laps of their parents and on the window ledges as their fathers ate their lunch and exchanged stories from their day’s work (although it was only lunchtime, I quickly realised they’d all been up since long before dawn).

  The man who had brought me here sat beside me and introduced himself as Jed Field. ‘Sandwiches,’ he said, looking at his lunch sadly. ‘That’s a surprise. Eat them for me, would you?’

  ‘Thanks, but I’m all right,’ I said, but I couldn’t help glancing at them hungrily.

  ‘Really,’ he said, pushing them closer. ‘I hate the damn things.’

  I took one gratefully.

  ‘You want a sip of this?’ he said, offering me a tin of soup. ‘It’s flavoured with Slumgullion.’

  ‘What’s Slumgullion?’ I asked. At once all of the children (there must have been twenty or so around me) let out an uproarious cry at my stupidity, and started asking me questions like: where had I been living all this time? Hadn’t I heard of the Slumgullion? Didn’t I know anything?

  ‘Wait, wait, wait, wait!’ I shouted, laughing. ‘Be fair, I’ve only been here for a day!’

  ‘I was joking,’ Jed explained. ‘The Slumgullion is a monster, made up to frighten the kiddies.’ The children heard him and all shouted in protest.

  One of the other men butted in. ‘It’s a real monster that lives in the water,’ he said, looking grave. ‘Shaped like a man but with a lizard’s skin, strong as an alligator and with teeth as long as your thumb.’

  ‘Where does it come from?’ I asked.

  ‘Nobody knows,’ he said. ‘It lives in the sewers and attacks only at night, and leaves terrible bite marks on its victims. None who’ve seen it survive – we only know it from the wounds it leaves on its victims and people who’ve heard it slipping and sliding about the streets at night. And if you ask me,’ he said quietly, so that everyone had to lean in and strain to hear his final words, ‘. . . it’s a . . .’ He looked pale and frightened, as though he couldn’t continue, but the children urged him on. (‘Don’t be afraid,’ one of the littler ones said.) ‘Well, if you ask me,’ he said, even quieter than before, so everyone had to crane their neck to hear, ‘. . . it’s a . . . load of utter rubbish!’

  The children broke out again in a chorus of anger and disapproval, and the costermonger smilingly ducked the scraps of bread that they threw at him.

  The fire warmed everyone as the men settled into their lunch. The street was so narrow that people on either side of it could easily talk as though they were in the same room. Except, I now noticed, one girl who sat on a doorstep alone near the top of the little street. She glanced occasionally towards the rest of us, as though she hardly knew we were there, and then her attention returned to the corner, unwavering and intense.

  ‘Why doesn’t she join us?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s poor Jenny,’ said Jed quietly. ‘She’s waiting for her father to come home, and he never will. He was a simple candlestick-maker, and a good father. One day the police arrested him for stealing. He refused to admit to it, so they found him guilty anyway, and hanged him.’

  ‘Hanged him,’ I said to myself. ‘That’s awful!’

  ‘No one has the courage to tell her, and it’s been more than a year now. Seeing her there, waiting for her father’s lantern to come round the corner every day, reminds us that the same fate could touch any of us at any moment, if that is the wish of Caspian Prye.’

  ‘Caspian Prye?’ I asked.

  Now everyone, all the men and women and children, stopped talking and looked at me. ‘You really don’t know nothing about this place, do you?’ asked Jed.

  I shrugged helplessly.

  ‘Well – Brigley tells it better than me.’ The children gathered around the seat of a big, curly-haired man and urged him to tell me Caspian’s story.

  ‘But you’ve heard it so many times!’ he protested, but that just made them ask him all the louder. ‘All right, all right,’ he said, picking up his plate and dabbing a potato in gravy. He popped it in his mouth, chewed, swallowed and addressed himself to me.

  ‘Well, then. Caspian Prye is the landlord of all Tumblewater, meaning he’s the owner of all our land. He owns the bricks in our walls and the mortar that holds them together and the mud you wriggle your toes into, little Lucy Pessell.’

  A girl in the crowd squeaked and huddled closer to her father’s legs.

  ‘Now the one thing that Caspian Prye has in common with the Slumgullion,’ he went on, ‘is that no one we know of has ever clapped eyes on him. All we know of him is through his men.’ Brigley pronounced this word with just about as much disgust as a man could heap into one syllable. ‘His men who come and tell us the rents have gone up, and his other men who come to turn us out of our houses or –’ and here he lowered his voice, with a glance towards little Jenny (we all looked at her too, still staring at the corner of the street) ‘– or to take us away to prison, or worse.

  ‘Now, nasty landowners are two a penny,’ he went on. ‘Once upon a time, Caspian Prye was nothing more than one of those. An evil, lonely man lost among the miles of corridors in his enormous house, never happening across another human, never having to worry what people thought of him, going quite mad in his solitude. Someone with no purpose but to squeeze every penny out of us so we could hardly afford to eat, and to make sure we remained poor and miserable. If it wasn’t for him, rather than sticking your toes through the holes in your shoes into the mud, Lucy, you might be wearing ballet shoes and performing at the opera house. And you, Jane Cramb, instead of rattling a st
ick along the railings might have been making wonderful music on a grand piano instead.’

  The girls stared at him, amazed by the idea of these transformations.

  ‘But then one terrible day from the darkened windows of his carriage he saw a girl on the street, and decided that she would be his wife. She had dark hair and pale skin like porcelain, the composure of a duchess and a smile that would calm an angry bear. And so on and so forth . . . I ain’t so good at describing girls anyway,’ said Brigley, although to my mind he was doing a very good job. And all of a sudden my heart started to race, because something about his description made me think of the girl I had seen in the window.

  ‘At the thought of having a wife, Caspian Prye saw himself changing his ways. He imagined being a good and kind landlord, presiding over a prosperous district of happy people. So he invited the girl to his house and introduced himself, and assumed that because he was very rich and she was very poor, she would fall in love with him at once. But, my little lads, that isn’t the way into a girl’s heart, you know,’ he said.

  ‘No one’s ever tried it on me, I’m sure,’ said his wife. He bit her hand playfully and when she cried out he kissed it better, pulled it round his neck again and went on with his story.

  ‘But the girl was repulsed by Caspian. He didn’t realize what had happened to him in all those years away from human company, never seeing a living soul, and leaving notes for his secretary each night so he didn’t have to speak to anyone. And eventually, after the longest time, he lost even the idea of other humans. Which is to say, he became so strange and twisted that at last he forgot he was a person at all.’

  There was an awful silence as we waited for Brigley to explain what this meant.

  ‘Now you children,’ he went on, after another mouthful of stew, ‘you know that our bodies grow back to what they understand? So, if you cut off a finger in a threshing machine, as my poor brother Gerald did, then it grows back perfectly as it did before.’ Several of the younger children nodded in acceptance of this delicious lie.

  ‘Right,’ said Brigley. ‘Just like we all know that men who keep dogs come to have the same face as their pets, in time.’ At this the oldest of the men was awoken by children around his chair laughing and pulling at his trousers. He snorted awake and in alarm gathered up the dog that had been snoozing at his feet, holding it close and inadvertently showing Brigley’s argument to be true.

  ‘So therefore it is said,’ he went on, now almost whispering, ‘that because after years of madness and solitude Caspian Prye no longer knew he was a man, his features no longer knew how to arrange themselves, and had grown so that he did not any longer even look like a man. And that is the strange unhuman figure that the girl saw. She was terrified, and could not meet his eye, and had to say no to his offer of marriage. And, so the story goes, Prye locked her away in one of his many buildings, and started searching for a way to trick her into accepting him.

  ‘There the girl remains to this very minute, somewhere in the buildings around us in Tumblewater, in a secret, cursed chamber. So whenever you walk along these streets, look upward at the windows. You might just see her looking down at you.

  ‘That’s not the end of the story,’ continued Brigley, ‘because from that day on Caspian Prye became like the very Devil, and took his revenge on Tumblewater. He took over the police force and turned them into the mean thugs and bullies we know. He changed the law so that almost any crime was punishable by death. Look at the dreaded Ditcher’s Fields cemetery by the river, where the crowds can see a dozen so-called “criminals” hanged every week, and their bodies hastily buried with no funeral. The place is filled to overflowing with his victims.’

  ‘Enough!’ shouted the man who had told me the story of the Orphan. He had put down his lunch and was looking quite disgusted. ‘Enough, enough. I have to work all day to put money in his pocket; it doesn’t mean I have to hear about him as well. Someone tell a story.’

  Straight away three or four of the men volunteered, each asking the crowd of children which tale they wanted to hear. I felt the warmth of the fire, and the comfort of the food in my stomach. There was nothing I wanted more than to be told a good story. Now more than ever, because as the man whose story was chosen – the sleepy old man with the dog – began to speak, I felt his words enwrap me like a cloak, and for those few minutes forgot everything that had happened to me in Tumblewater, and the horrors I had heard about Prye.

  ‘Now this one is about a poor lost character like Daniel here, but one who is even younger than all of you kids. Do you want to hear it?’

  The crowd replied emphatically that they did, at a very high volume.

  So the man began the tale of . . .

  At the top of Tumblewater Hill there was a windmill. It was a large building, which, instead of looking rather picturesque as windmills quite often do, was in fact impressively ugly, looming against the sky and towering over all that was around it. The middle of a city is a funny place for a windmill, but it had been built a long time ago and the city had gradually grown around it. Now it looked despondent and forgotten among the newer, smarter factories, which perhaps accounted for some of its ugliness.

  The rain fell down upon the enormous brick edifice of the mill, just as it did on everything else. (‘Edifice, Lucy Pessell?’ said the man at this point. ‘Why, let’s just say – the front.’) On the roof it made a roaring din, which all but deafened the men who laboured around the huge and dangerous machinery.

  The three clerks who worked in the little office, though, were tucked away at the back of the building, and could only hear the rain battling against the large windows that overlooked the cobbled street outside.

  The oldest, roundest and kindliest of the three men was Mr Welling. He had worked in the same job for forty-two years, for which he was grateful, and he took a jovial, friendly interest in his younger colleagues – Mr Tuck, who was a thin, tense man of about forty and young Dick, a pleasant but rather simple lad, a few weeks shy of his seventeenth birthday.

  Each of the clerks’ desks faced the window, so that when a delivery of grain was made they could look down to the wagon and count the sacks, and make sure they were not being short-changed by the farmer. Then one of the clerks would withdraw the money from the huge safe and hand payment over to the farmer’s delivery lad, who would usually be standing in the corner, dripping and cursing and wringing out his cap into the washing bowl the clerks had placed there specially, to stop their floor from getting wet.

  Every day Mr Welling arrived to find the office precisely as he had left it, and precisely as he had found it every other morning since his first day at the mill as a boy of sixteen. Every evening he rose from his desk at six thirty, having remained for an extra half hour to double-check the books, and to make a couple of discreet corrections to Dick’s ledger. Then he would put on his coat, look out at the rain, shiver, take a little tot of brandy from his hip flask to protect him from the cold, collect his umbrella from the stand and set out into the streets.

  On this particular day, Mr Welling went through the above routine in every detail, and when he left he wove through the narrow lanes towards home feeling a little more distracted and unhappy than usual. Approaching his sixtieth birthday, he was only a few years away from taking retirement, and with each passing hour he longed for it more. After a lifetime’s hard work, he pined for the modest pension he had managed to save for himself, and the chance to spend long winter days (like this one) by the fireside with a newspaper, or a good book, and maybe a little treat like some biscuits and cheese.

  So much did thoughts of retirement consume him that before he knew it he was at his front door, holding the umbrella with one hand and fiddling in his pocket for the keys with the other.

  As his hand scrabbled among the tobacco pouch, the matchbox, the pipe and other assorted items, his eye fell on the little torrent that whished past his door day and night, splashing over the bottom step. After a few seconds, still unabl
e to find the keys and moving his hand to search in another pocket, he realized he had been staring at a little package that was bobbing in the stream, stopped from flowing downward by the step’s edge. It was about the size of a loaf of bread and wrapped in a coarse, mud-covered cloth.

  Curious, he leaned down and poked it with his finger, and then jumped backwards with fright at the sound of a baby’s cry.

  ‘Good lord!’ he thought to himself. ‘Someone has lost their child!’ In a state of alarm he gathered up the package, found his key and bustled inside, with water dripping all down him.

  Inside his kitchen, he placed the bundle down carefully on the table, removed his coat and hat as quickly as he could, and ran to the cupboard in his bedroom to fetch a blanket.

  Weak and tremulous cries kept coming from the bundle as he returned with the blanket and stripped away the sopping swaddling clothes. The cries grew weaker and, fearing for the child’s health, he wrapped it up carefully and then held it against his shoulder, patting it gently as he had seen women do, and speaking softly to it.

  ‘There we go,’ he said. ‘All right now, everything’s all right.’

  Soon the baby slept soundly against his shoulder.

  Well, that’s all very well, he thought, but what am I to do with it? Its mother must be sick with worry . I must find her at once.

  As gently as he could he laid it in an old picnic basket, which he had almost forgotten he owned, and which he first lined carefully with blankets and bedsheets. Then he made a fire and lit it, and placed the improvised cot on a kitchen chair close to it, so the baby might be warm. He also lit a candle and placed it nearby, to add to the meagre light of the fire, so that the baby might not be alarmed by darkness when it woke, although he had no idea whether children were afraid of the dark (as he had been and, secretly, still was) when they were just babies.