‘You could set on the porch awhile,’ be heard Kez say. ‘Mighty comfortable chair for rockin’.’
‘I’ve been sitting for long enough,’ replied the stranger, cheerfully obstinate. ‘You live here alone?’
‘Jus’ me an’ the dawg,’ replied Kez, preferring that the stranger should not suspect that someone might be waiting with an axe.
‘Two chairs,’ pointed out the stranger.
‘Oh, them,’ said Kez. Then his voice brightened. ‘Sometimes I set in the one. Sometimes I set in the other. Mighty comfortable chairs. C’mon through the house.’
‘The spring’s round the back,’ remarked the stranger.
‘Sure,’ said Kez. ‘Cool, clear, spring water. The Lord provides.’
‘Then I’ll walk round outside,’ said the stranger. ‘Shoes are dusty. Wouldn’t want to trample dirt inside your house.’
Adam’s muscles were screaming for respite. Soon he would either have to lower the axe or drop it. Sweat trickled into the corner of his eye.
‘Walk round outside,’ echoed Kez unhappily. He raised his voice, hoping that Adam would hear and deal with the change of plan. ‘To th’back. I guess the dawg’ll be waiting for us round the corner, but you’ve no cause to fear the dawg.’
At last Adam lowered the axe. With unusual agility, considering his fifteen stone, he hurried through the shack, past the bedroom where Betsey lay, and through the back door. As he took up his position by the wall, and raised the axe again, approaching voices could already be heard.
‘Appreciate what you’re doing for me, neighbour,’ the stranger was saying.
‘The Lord provides,’ responded Kez automatically.
Adam edged forward. One good downward blow would be sufficient, and out here there would be less mess to clear up. Then the stranger seemed to stand still again.
Driver’s long-dormant combat instinct was stirring. Ahead lay a blind corner. Instinctively Driver wanted to take it in a wide sweep to avoid any possible ambush; but the red-head was crowding him, almost pushing him against the wall. Between the red-head and the wall there was no room to maneuver, no freedom to use his arms. To give himself time to plan, Driver stopped by a window.
‘Looks like the frame needs work,’ he remarked casually.
‘One o’ these days,’ murmured Kez. ‘Was just a’sayin’ there’s things need to be done.’
‘Saying?’
‘To th’dawg.’
‘Intelligent dog.’
Driver tried to glance through the window, but the glass was so grimed that nothing but a blur could be seen beyond; a whitish blob that could have been a bed in the middle of the room.
Kez noticed the glance. Nothing was happening as it should. It was almost as bad as the time when they had to chase the scout and cut his throat in the woods. He had screamed and struggled. If they weren’t careful, this one might scream and struggle too. This one had to be reassured about the things he had seen through the window. But when he spoke, Keziah’s voice was strained.
‘Guess that’s Betsey,’ he croaked. ‘You don’t have to worry none ’bout Betsey.’
‘Betsey?’
The last pane of glass was broken. Kez had meant to fix it some time, but they never used the room, and Betsey wouldn’t mind. Driver peered through the hole.
In contrast to the bright sunlight outside, the room was in shadow; but this made the bed in the middle of the room so much more conspicuous. The coverings had once been white, except where great, dark stains were splashed. A thick film of grey dust covered everything, so at first it was not easy to make out what lay on the bed. It had a human form—if human can be taken to mean a mere structure of bones covered like a drum with parchment skin. Judging by the flowing hair the thing on the bed had once been a girl: but should any girl be holding her head in her hands? —especially when that head rested on her navel.
Slack-jawed, Driver turned from the window to find himself staring into the florid, shining face of Kez.
‘Said there’s things needin’ to be fixed,’ muttered Kez apologetically.
Driver’s scream was like a trapped animal. Kez was taken aback by it, knowing that he hadn’t even touched the man. Driver turned and ran. He had reached the porch before Kez had gathered his wits sufficiently to act.
Hearing the cry Adam leaped out from behind the shack. He did not wait for explanations, but seeing the stranger hurtling away, pounded after him. Kez followed.
Driver could not piece together the situation. At this time he did not want to. His one concern was to get away from the shack and everyone and everything in it as soon as he could. He kicked the hoe left lying in front of the porch, and lost valuable seconds as he paused to grab it up. It was a poor weapon, but better than bare hands. Then he heard shouts behind him as he fled towards the car.
His breath whistled painfully in his throat, his chest seemed clamped in a vice unable to admit more air; an ache spread from his calves to his ankles; his feet might have been encased in leaden boots, rising and falling as slowly as in a nightmare; and he knew that, even with the few yards advantage he had snatched, he could not reach the car. He turned at bay.
A wild giant with a chest-length beard that flared red bore down on him. This monster, with massive shoulders and a waist like an oak, brandished an axe that might have felled a sapling at a blow. The creature screeched furiously, and with the lunacy that survives in the numb corner of a terrified mind, Driver thought of a baby whose bottle has been taken away.
For a second Driver stared at death as he had done year’s before. Then, with a click, another man seemed to take over; a man used to finding a bayonet in his hands. Automatically he thrust the hoe at the exposed navel of the giant, who being no more than a man, bent double, winded. Adam fell forward, and the axe flew from his hands, skimming over the hard ground to come to rest a couple of yards away from the car.
Driver pounced upon it. When he straightened up, Kez was hardly more than an arm’s length away, staring incredulously. The axe whirled, and a head bounced along the ground. The body swayed; then as twin founts of blood spouted from the neck, Kez fell across his brother, who writhed and moaned in the dirt.
Driver dropped the axe, turned, and stumbled idiot-faced towards his car. Dull-eyed and openmouthed, relying on habit to pilot him, he fell into the driving seat and turned the ignition key. No-one stopped him as he drove away. The sound of the engine faded, and the white dust settled again.
For a while Adam lay still. The discomfort had passed, and he would have liked to sleep; but the ground was hard and gritty, there was a weight on his back, and some hot, sticky liquid had been poured over him. He stirred, then sat up.
His brother’s body rolled over. His brother’s head, still incredulous, stared at him. Adam stared back.
‘I guess that was your fault, Kez,’ he said at last. ‘Goin’ on ’bout them canned beans. If the Lord had meant beans fer eatin’ they’d walk on legs just like you’r me.’
He stood up and rubbed his bruised belly.
‘That’s what comes of questioning the Lord’s provisioning arrangements,’ he went on. ‘Looks like we’ll be eatin’ this winter, Kez, but you won’t be sharin .’
He put his hands under his brother’s shoulders, and began to drag the body towards the shack. ‘The Lord provides,’ he cried.
One of these days he would go back and pick up the head.
‘Praise the Lord!’
PERFECT LADY by Robin Smyth
I DON’T KNOW WHETHER to jump. It’s a long way down. Long way from the roof to the ground. Twenty-one storeys. And at the bottom it’s all those concrete pillars. What a mess I’ll be in. Makes you go cold just to think about it. Still, without my Winnie, life’s going to be all hairshirts and sourberries and I’ll never get my Winnie back now. I saw them wheeling her out of the garden in her chair. Two big policemen. They looked ever so small from up here. Like shadows on the stone. They don’t realize what they’ve done to m
e those policemen, taking my Winnie away like this. I mean, what has my Winnie ever done to deserve such treatment? She’s a very nice girl. Perfect lady. Never nags. Just accepts her role in life as a servant to the male. It’s going to be terrible without her. No more cuddles on winter’s nights. No more kissing on the sofa. No more reclining on the rug listening to Beethoven together. I like Beethoven, I do. Winnie does too. Everything I like, Winnie likes. And that’s as it should be.
God, it is a long way down and there’s a cold wind blowing across the river from Fulham way. Suppose I did jump and the wind caught me and tossed me into the branches of that oak down there. I’d be impaled. That’d hurt. Perhaps it wouldn’t be right to jump. Not a man of my age. Thirty-six. So young. Be a crime against humanity. Poor, dear Winnie. I wonder what they’ll do to her. I bet that Lizzie Spring’s got something to do with it. I wouldn’t be surprised. She’s a funny woman that Lizzie Spring.
I loved her, Lizzie Spring. Long before I got Winnie of course. Long before. But I did love her. Yes, I did. From the moment I spotted her in the automatic laundry place down Lillie Road one January evening. I thought she was I the loveliest, most desirable creature I’d clapped eyes on since Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch.
She was blonde and doll-like and as feminine as a lace handkerchief and I wondered if I dared talk to her. I was going on thirty two at the time and though I wore rather thick-lensed glasses and had a slight limp due to childhood rickets and a lump on my neck which was not noticeable when I bad my coat collar turned up, I was quite handsome in a journalistic sort of way. Kind of a Scoop McCoy, Fleet Street special reporter type, if you get my meaning. I always parted my hair down the middle and I would brush it with Brylcreem till it shone and though my blue stripe suit was a wee bit threadbare about the elbows, it was nonetheless clean, as were my brown brogues and my shirt collar. One thing my mother always taught me… no matter how shabby your attire, if it was clean the world would respect you. Mind you, I never got much respect from the world. Not in general. If they’d thought I was rich… well… they wouldn’t have laughed at me like they did… but they didn’t think I was rich so they just kept on and on. Whispering.
In the office of Baldry and Blacker, the Cornhill seed merchants where I worked before Mummy and Daddy passed on, the clerks used to call me Squinty instead of Rupert, which is my true name. And the typists used to laugh at me a lot. Because of my limp, and also because of a big, brown birthmark which stuck to one side of my face like some giant, furry beetle. They never knew that I could see them laughing. But I did. Oh yes. Lizzie never laughed at me. She told me that she could see in me the soul of a poet and I explained that this was probably because my heart was bent on a literary career rather than that of a pen pusher in a seed factory. I courted her for several months and when the first warm days of spring skipped in to cheer the year, I proposed that we be married. Lizzie was delighted and for the first time since we met she kissed me. Not a long, soft, passionate kiss but a sweet, ladylike touch upon my birthmark, an action which caused my blood to run cold and my heart to beat wildly in my chest.
I’ve never understood why she went and eloped with this bloke Georgie Milford out of Dingwell’s garage in the Fulham Palace Road. I do realize that a lot of it was due to my Mummy and Daddy. They only met her once, but they hated her on sight and said she was nothing but a slut… a gold-digging slut… but Lizzie did love me, she told me so often… so why she went off the way she did completely bamboozles my imagination.
It was so sudden. One minute she was my betrothed… and the next she was hot-footing off with this excuse for a garage mechanic. He was six feet odd, blond and bearded and apparently he used to try a spot of this weight-lifting caper in his spare time. The man was an ox. An illiterate, ill-bred ox. Lizzie met him at Further Education classes apparently and Lord only knows what lies he told her to entice her away from me but they wound up flitting off to some new town in Herefordshire where they were given a council house, garden back and front at the expense of rate-payers like muggins. I can tell you truly I was very upset. Very upset indeed because I always thought that Lizzie was the perfect lady. But she was nothing less than a two-timing, underhanded little hussy and I can tell you I was in half a mind to go down to that there Herefordshire and do something. Pay her back. Throw a drop of acid at her or something. You know, throw it in her face. Scar her a bit. Make her pay. The vicious, ungrateful little hussy.
Still, I was well rid of that little tramp. I decided in my heart that I would not ally myself with any such painted hussies again but I would search for… well, a plainer, more reliable type. Someone you could trust. Put your faith in. A kind of perfect lady if you like.
I met Daphne in the Hammersmith Bingo Hall. She was a Midlands girl from. Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent. About forty. She had blue eyes and a thin face and little hairs curling from her chin and she possessed a distinct body smell which was in its own way quite attractive. Yet there was about her one thing which reminded me of that slattern, Lizzie. Her hair. It was soft and natural blonde and hung about her shoulders like silken bubbles. Very nice. We got talking and after Bingo we walked slowly together through the back doubles towards her digs in Greyhound Road. She didn’t stop talking for one second. Talk, talk, talk, in this horrible nasal accent of hers. If it hadn’t been for that gorgeous head of hair, I’m sure I would have fled from her after the first five eternal minutes. But it fascinated me. That hair. It didn’t really belong to her. Didn’t suit her. She wasn’t fitted to keep it. Hair so beautiful was created for Lizzie, though I’m not praising Lizzie in any way of course, she was what she was and that’s that… but the more I stared at this shining glory of pale gold on this ugly head, the more I realized that I had a duty to perform… that head of hair just had to be rescued from that talkative head.
With my four-bladed penknife, which I’ve carried since I was a lad in Beaver patrol of the 29th Fulham, I slit Daphne’s throat. So swiftly and expertly that she hardly gurgled as she slithered from my loving embrace. Then with infinite care, I knelt beside her and gradually sawed the scalp from her noggin. She looked really horrible laying there all dead and bald, so I dragged her to a wheelbarrow which some builder had left in this dark and narrow alley and I dumped her body in that barrow and covered her gently with some dusty cement sacks to protect her from the rain and marauding rats, then tucking the warm and bloody head of hair under my raincoat, I hastened home.
I met loads of girls after that. There was Mildred from Hemel Hempstead, who had the most beautiful brown eyes I’ve ever seen, well, I should say the second most beautiful pair really, because Lizzie Spring’s were the most beautiful; that I must confess, even though we all know what a tramp that Lizzie was. I used to like looking into Mildred’s eyes, admiring them… but I couldn’t stand her stutter. Couldn’t say two words on the run without hissing and stumbling like an idiot woman and after two whole nights of miserable courting I took her for a stroll along the Putney towing path where I cleverly garroted her with a rusty cheese wire which had fallen into my possession. I lay her carefully on the damp night grass and very tenderly I gouged out those fascinating eyes with a teaspoon which I had brought along for that very purpose, then I tipped her in the swollen river and, with brown eyes carefully wrapped in tissue paper and popped into an Old Holborn Inn, I made my way home where I transferred the eyes to a jar of pickling vinegar and put them on a shelf in the pantry right close to Daphne’s head of hair which I kept, brushed and washed daily, under a Stilton cheese dish which had once belonged to my grandmother.
Now although I might have earlier hinted at it, I never exactly told you that I am quite the little rich man. All inherited of course from Mummy and Daddy. Mummy and Daddy died quite suddenly you see, a couple of years back (not long after Lizzie done the dirty on me in fact)… died after their car brakes failed when travelling down a mountain roadside in Wales where we had gone for a month’s holiday. Luckily, I had stayed behind in the hotel at A
berystwyth looking at my stamp collection of British and Commonwealth commemoratives, else I too would have joined them in that ghastly five thousand feet plunge to eternity. Mummy and Daddy left me this house on Lavender Hill, which is big and Victorian, two others in the better part of Chelsea, a portfolio of the most excellent shares and sixteen thousand, eight hundred pounds in cash. Yes, they left me very comfortable.
I often wonder, you know, if it was my wealth, or rather my one-day-to-be-inherited wealth, which so attracted that strumpet Lizzio to me and not my looks and personality as she would have me believe, because I can strongly recall that my opening gambit to this Jezebel of the washing machine shop was. ‘Hi, babe, how’d you fancy getting hooked up with a millionaire?’ And her eyes, those lovely brown eyes, just sparkled with LSD signs. She pursued the subject and when I told her all about Mummy and Daddy and their piles of loot, she all but volunteered to accompany me to the Victoria and Albert museum the following evening for a night out. Still, why should I care what her stinking attitudes were. I don’t even want to think about that harlot… feature for feature she doesn’t even compare with my Winnie.
Penelope was a young lass from Carlisle way whom I met at West Brompton underground station. She was just getting on and I was just getting off, but some strange compulsion made me do a swift about turn and leap back into the train to land like some white knight errant beside her. We got to chatting about the weather and money and work, and by the time we arrived at Liverpool Street station, I’d given her a tenner as she told me some very sad story about not being able to afford a maxi coat for the winter, and we were indeed on the most intimate terms, I arranging to meet her from her place of work that very afternoon.
Penelope had the milkiest, whitest arms in this whole wide world. Really soft and lovely they were. Cream satin. It seemed impossible to believe that such a broomstick of a girl, with such a coarse complexion and truly horrible manners could possess these lovely arms. God, it would appear, had made a criminal error and I felt bound to put the matter right.
The Satyr's Head: Tales of Terror Page 7