“I’m not going to ask about what it’s been used for,” he said, sniffing it and smiling.
“Of course, you wouldn’t want to be linked to anything illegal,” I said.
“My dealings have all been legal and above-board,” he said. “And I’m awfully grateful to you for carrying out your assignment so thoroughly. This is exactly what I was hoping for.”
“Unfortunately there were a few hitches on the way,” I said, and gave him a brief version of events in Newfane and on the train. “I guess you expected some trouble.”
“I had no idea.”
“Your family ties to Newfane go way back,” I said.
Wade shook his head negligently, still looking at the filter.
“The way I doped it out,” I said, “your grandfather used to fetch and carry for that tribe in Newfane. But he was smart, smarter than the rest of them. He saw a way he could make some real money. So he and his partner Hooker got hold of some of their hardware—maybe because that needed fixing too. That was the famous Wade-Hooker valve gear that made locomotives just a bit more efficient and paid for your modest place here. You know Hooker’s nephew is still in Newfane, keeping a store?”
“Is that so? I never knew Hooker.”
“You wouldn’t. He disappeared after the valve gear was invented,” I said. “But your grandfather stayed in with the Newfane crowd—that signet ring was his, wasn’t it, with the wavy sign on it? I bet he still did a few odd jobs, fixed them up with help.”
Wade glanced involuntarily at the ring. The pattern was exactly the same as the strange alphabet in Dr. K.’s notebook. And Walter Brown, the hoods’ eyes and ears in Newfane, had been wearing one just like it.
“And your father was another helper in his time. He never tried anything too clever, just hung on to his money. But you’re not so smart, and when things started to get tough for you, you thought you’d stick your hand in the cookie jar.”
“Mr. Jones, I’ve already said you did a good job, and I’m not averse to giving you a bonus for your efficiency,” he said. “But this conversation is over.”
“I think you set it all up,” I said, and he did not try to interrupt. “I think your friends in the anthill in Newfane told you they needed a scientist, and you smelled a business opportunity. Mutual benefit: they got a brand new filter, and so did you. So you found a scientist who was down on his luck and desperate enough to help you, because he’s just had his factory burned down. And you told me to send the formula as soon as I got it, because you didn’t expect I’d be coming back.”
Spencer Wade looked at me. It was not a friendly look.
“Dr. K. was smarter than you,” I said. “He double-crossed you. He brought in some more backers, tough guys that you couldn’t just tell to scram. He was smart, he invited all three gangs. They all had to join up, or see the others get one over on them. He knew they’d give the Newfane boys a fight if they tried anything. Dr. K. always counted on slipping away when the time came—instead of just disappearing into the anthill forever. How am I doing?”
“Why did you give me the filter?” he asked.
“I was paid to do a job,” I said. “I did it. The filter is all yours. The boys from the North Side, the South Side, and the outfit will all be knocking on your door real soon, and you’ll be sharing it with them. You’ll have a lead on the industrial market, maybe enough to make a pile of money if you’re smart.”
“Well, I think I’ve taken up enough of your valuable time,” Wade said, oozing sarcasm. He was trying to be unpleasant. He was an amateur. “I’d better let you get back to running your big important detective agency.”
“I’ll do that,” I said, picking up my hat. “And you enjoy yourself. But you know and I know why your grandfather disappeared. Your father knows that even if he keeps cruising in the Caribbean and trying to stay ahead, one day they’ll find him. That’s what’s going to happen to you too. Those folks in Newfane always come to claim their own, don’t they?”
He shrugged as though I bored him, and pressed a button on the arm of his chair. The flunky appeared in two seconds.
“Send the invoice to my office,” he told me, and I already knew it would never be paid. The money was nothing, but men like him enjoy their petty victories. To the flunky he added, “Show Mr. Jones out.”
Wade did not offer to shake hands. I was happy to get out of there. I even waved at the two parties in the motor car waiting outside. So long as Wilson got his hands on a copy of the filter he’d get over it in the end, but I wasn’t going to be asking him for any favours soon.
Miss Transnational Development Services Inc. was waiting in my office, in my chair.
She was posed perfectly, smoking a cigarette. There were no butts in the ashtray, so she had not been waiting long.
“I’m pleased to see you back in one piece, Mr. Jones,” she said.
“The pleasure is all mine,” I said, hanging up my hat.
“Things turned out better than we expected,” she said. “We picked up Dr. K. Outside Newfane. It sounds as though you shook things up.”
“Just trying to do my job,” I said. “How is the good doctor?”
I would be sorry if anything had happened to him. He was a strange character, but I do believe he tried to do the right thing by his own standards.
“We lost him again,” she said, and I nearly laughed at her sour expression. Dr. K. was a slippery character all right. “But perhaps now you’ll think differently about working for us, now you know what we’re dealing with. Now you know about certain parties on the other side. We can put some very lucrative business your way.”
“Is that so?”
“I’m Estelle, by the way.”
I thought about what they were dealing with and how I felt about another case like Newfane. It did not take long.
“Not a chance, lady,” I said, and held the door open for her.
Estelle rose, mashing her cigarette out and picking up her bag.
“Au revoir, Mr. Jones,” she said with a half-smile as she passed. I shut the door behind her.
The whole thing was wrapped up and filed away, and I walked away from it. That was pretty much the end of the story. Pretty much, but not quite.
Two weeks later I had a cryptic postcard in neat handwriting:
“P –> K8.” It was chess notation: Pawn moves to the eighth square in the King’s row. Home and safe.
It was postmarked from Valparaiso. I had to look that one up in the gazetteer; it’s a port in the Atacama Desert, Chile. The driest place on earth. Too dry for mushrooms.
Dr. K. had made it to his eighth square. I guess he jumped from the car because he didn’t trust Wilson. Or he didn’t trust me. Or maybe he realised the hoods would follow the car and he didn’t want to be in it when they caught up. He was a smart guy.
I had other reminders too, like the claustrophobia nightmares, which stayed with me for quite a while, in fact never really left. They come back sometimes when I’m tired after a bad day. I’m paralysed, in the dark, crammed in a tiny box like a metal coffin and I can’t breathe. But it’s worse than that. Imagine waking up and finding your feet have been amputated, and your legs. And your arms. And the rest of your body. All gone. You can’t breathe because you don’t have lungs to breathe with. No mouth to scream.
I’d been at pains not to tell Spencer Wade just how much I knew about Newfane and its creepy inhabitants. So long as I just thought they were a bunch of crazy people I was safe.
But I’d seen too much. What Dr. K. told me about their being some kind of walking fungus was bats, but it all added up. They didn’t move like people. Their bodies did not bend like human bodies under those robes, the joints were all wrong.
When I shot that fake cop, he didn’t bleed. But he started to smoke. Weird, white smoke. I knew Dr. K. had special bullets, and maybe tracers do something like that, but I don’t think so.
When Moran had shot them up underground…the lighting was bad, but there is no
way they were human. That was why he was still gawping when they jumped him. Those were not bullet-riddled human bodies leaking blood; the Tommy gun chopped them up like they were watermelons, leaving great chunks of greenish-black pulp all over. They were still flopping about on the ground, only half dead. No, they weren’t human at all.
The worst thing was at the end, though, after we heard Moran call out and I saw the thing in the vault.
I only looked in for an instant, but I saw one of them.
He had taken his hood off.
And he had taken his face off.
That white face was just a plaster mask lying on one of the metal shelves. Beneath it there was nothing, no face, just a mass of tendrils sprouting from a narrow, black head. Something like a crayfish. Like the thing I saw that night outside Pretski’s or moving in the shadows under the trees that left tracks which weren’t footprints.
But that wasn’t what gave me nightmares. Those ones where I wake up and I can’t move and I’m lying there trapped and all alone in the dark.
In that vault, I saw Moran, what was left of him, in the corner. Moran was no hero, but he had stood up to those things when the rest of us gave up. He fought like a man.
In my last image of him, Moran’s head looked as if it had been opened with a circular saw, the top taken right off and the insides emptied out. They had finished him all right.
Moran was still talking, though. He was still alive, sort of. But the voice was not coming from the pithed, brainless body. It was coming from one of those tin cans. They had put his brain in a can, and he was still alive, still feeling, still talking.
Trapped in a tin can. In the smallest metal coffin you can think of, alive.
And he’s still there.
THE MONSTERS IN THE PARK
Crystal Palace, South London, 1936
Nothing less than the great enterprise and resources of the Crystal Palace
Company could have attempted for the first time to illustrate and realise—
the revivifying of the ancient world—to call up from the abyss of time
and from the depths of the earth, those vast forms and gigantic beasts
which the Almighty Creator designed with fitness to inhabit and precede
us in possession of this part of the earth called Great Britain.
—Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, “The Geological
Restorations at the Crystal Palace”
Britons ought to know better than to serve alien interests.
—Oswald Mosely, “The British Union and The Jews”
I
There is no evidence of those terrible and fatal event sat the Crystal Palace. The fire destroyed everything. Webster, the only other witness, has his own reasons for keeping quiet. It is just as well. Knowledge of the threat literally hanging over humanity would cause needless panic. We have always known that men are mortal, that all empires pass away, that all species disappear and leave only fossils. But it is something else to see the form that our end will take. Everyone now fears another war in Europe; but there is an infinitely greater danger.
This is why, when the train takes me past Crystal Palace Park, I turn away to avoid seeing the monumental sculpted dinosaurs amid the ferns and palm fronds. They are too much a reminder of what occurred there.
I would not have called Webster a friend. He was no more than an acquaintance, and since our days at oxford I had only seen him at a handful of dinners and social gatherings. He was from a wealthy family, born to be a stockbroker, and not of our set at all. I knew him mainly through my late friend George, that genial soul who died so violently at the culmination of that horror in Dulwich nine years earlier. George made a habit of cultivating those who were attached to money or power, and Webster was always destined for a princedom in the financial kingdom. I could easily have put off Webster’s request, but his communication was so urgent and so desperate that it would have taken a harder man than I to turn him away.
Webster married soon after leaving university. He was now the father of an eight-year-old son who had a burning desire to come to see the Crystal Palace. This was not so extraordinary, but the circumstances around it were unusual. Webster poured out the story in a letter that ran to a dozen pages. It was a lengthy epistle for a man whose usual style of communication was a terse and imperious paragraph.
The boy was a perfectly normal healthy lad, explained Webster, quite the sportsman when it came to soccer and rugby, much as Webster himself had been. Paul was not apt to study, and drove his mother to distraction by arriving home with scuffed shoes or buttons missing from his shirt. He tormented his sister and stole sweets from the table. His manners were not so polished, and over-indulgence had fostered the habit of answering back to his mother, and even at times to his father. Webster was confident that a few years of public school would smooth down these rough edges to an acceptable finish. But at the age of eight, he accepted that boys would be boys.
Some weeks previously, a sudden change had come over Paul. He had fallen into a fever for two days, which the doctor was at a loss either to explain or to treat. Paul recovered as quickly as he had contracted the illness, but immediately afterwards Webster had found him reading a book.
“I dare say you would think this quite normal,” Webster wrote. “But to discover Paul reading of his own free will, and moreover reading a scientific textbook, astonished and worried me more than I can tell you. The boy NEVER reads.”
The fever had brought about other unaccountable changes. Paul lost all interest in kicking a ball about, or playing with the dog, or oppressing his little sister. He preferred to stay indoors all day, reading books. At school he was quiet and obedient, and had not been punished in weeks. The teachers were favourably impressed at his progress.
Paul was unable to give an account of the change. His mother was cautiously pleased at the transformation, but his father was horrified.
“You must meet him for yourself,” wrote Webster. “But I say at once that the Paul we have now is not the Paul who is my son. Perhaps you have some experience with these things as a teacher. The doctors I have consulted have all been worse than useless.”
I had seen rapid transformations of children in the past. It was certainly not unknown for a boy to be all boisterous energy one term and completely subdued the next. It was never a good sign, and one did not need to be a psycho-analyst to detect an ‘underlying trauma’ of one sort or another. As a rule it was best not to explore such matters too deeply. Outside interference is never welcome in family matters. But this seemed altogether different.
After the fever, Paul had a mania for hunting fossils. This had apparently passed, and now he had a passion to see Crystal Palace, and he had mounted a campaign to visit here as soon as possible. The boy had even consulted maps and railway timetables as though he meant to run away and come on his own. Webster had not felt equal to the challenge, and begged me—begged me—to provide my services as a knowledgeable guide.
“I don’t know where to begin,” said Webster. “The boy sometimes seems about to say something to me, then clams up. I’m sure you could do much better with him, and perhaps you will be able to get to the bottom of it all. What has happened to him? Will he ever return to normal? What is to be done?”
He wrote like a man at the end of his tether. I could hardly recognise the hearty fellow I had known, stalwart of the rugby team and the saloon bar. I might have laughed to see this titan of the world of finance brought low by a small boy, but Webster was troubled and thought I could help. I was, I admit, intrigued as well as flattered that he sought my assistance.
And so, having arranged a day’s leave, at ten o’clock on a cold Monday morning in November, I walked up from my digs in Dulwich to wait outside Crystal Palace rail station. It was not yet raining, but I had brought an umbrella. The umbrella functions as a walking stick; I walk more easily with one after my injury. The station disgorged its colourful cargo of sightseers and tourists, uniformed nannies with the
ir little charges, Europeans clutching guidebooks, country gentlemen sporting outdated Edwardian plus-fours. At the weekend there would have been hundreds of people; today there was a fair scattering. And in their midst was Webster, a prosperous city gentleman clad in a fine camel-hair coat, holding the hand of a small boy.
If you saw a photograph of the lad you would not have detected anything unusual. From his sturdy shoes and skinned knees to his blond hair and battered cap, he was just like any other schoolboy. But he moved strangely: he did not run around like the others, but walked rather stiffly. He stared too long and too fixedly at things instead of looking about him. Even from fifty feet away the effect was slightly disconcerting.
The term autism was only just coming into use, but of course I knew the type. They develop quite normally for the first few years but then seem to slip back; they may cease speaking and become clumsy and fixated on things. They withdraw into their own world. But eight years seemed much too late for it to show.
“What ho!” I cried, raising the umbrella.
“William, old man,” said Webster, and seized my hand like the proverbial drowning man. He was a powerful individual, and he had the manner of easy authority about him. But his command was muted beneath layers of anxiety. “It’s good to see you again. Are you keeping well?”
After a few pleasantries he turned to the boy, who had been gazing steadily at me.
“Paul, this is Mr. Blake,” said Webster. “He’s a schoolteacher, and he also knows a great deal about Crystal Palace, and everything else too. I’m sure he’ll be able to answer your questions.”
“Pleased to meet you, Paul,” I said, extending a hand.
“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Blake,” Paul said gravely.
The Dulwich Horror & Others Page 20