by Miles Gibson
Hazlitt and Vine were her two most devoted admirers. They were both small, dapper men and when they stood next to the magnificent Mrs Clancy she took on the appearance of a fat queen bee with an escort of drones. They fluttered and hissed at each other and sometimes drove her to distraction.
Mr Hazlitt was a florist. He owned a large shop in Dorchester and claimed to have succeeded in breeding a new strain of rose which he had christened the Hazlitt Beauty. There had been a great deal of controversy over this claim in rose-growing society and he was still fighting for the recognition he thought he deserved. He was a small man who wore satin waistcoats and a gold wristwatch. He was very careful about his appearance and was never seen without a rose pinned proudly to his collar. He wore the flower in the manner of an old soldier displaying his medal.
Mr Vine was a tailor. He had once cut cloth for the crowned heads of Europe but was now reduced to running repairs on the trouser seats of council clerks. His own clothes never gave an inch to passing fashions but were valued according to their volume and weight. His body never quite filled the suits he wore and for this reason he often gave the appearance of being slightly smaller and more crumpled than Hazlitt. But the two were perfectly matched in their devotion to the widow.
Their rivalry was constant and bitter. Hazlitt never lost an opportunity to load the woman’s arms with great wreaths of scented blossoms. And he could afford sometimes to squander money on beads and bracelets. Vine, for his part, could not stretch to such expensive gestures. But he’d had the good fortune, on more than one occasion, to have actually been permitted to enter Mrs Clancy’s bedroom and there ordered to take a tape measure to her voluptuousness and measure alterations for a dress or a coat.
When Hazlitt first heard the news he’d turned faint with rage. The thought of Vine alone with Mrs Clancy in her apricot silks was too much for him. The idea of the old rascal having leave to measure her most intimate parts made him choke on his own fury. He had interrogated Vine a thousand times about the matter. And Vine, true to his nature, managed to embroider his story with the most lavish and intricate details.
There were times when Mrs Clancy prayed for the florist and the tailor to enter into some unholy matrimony with each other and leave her in peace. She loved them as good and loyal friends but she could hardly be expected to entertain them in bed for their favours. She tried sometimes to imagine the pair of them stripped naked and placed mutely beside her in the sheets. Hazlitt with his large yellow eyes bleary with lust and asthma, his lacquered hair leaving snail’s trails on the pillows. Vine, small and crumpled, his teeth left behind on the table and a thimble between his legs.
It felt cold in the consulting room. Mrs Clancy slipped off the shroud and gazed into the crystal, hoping to glimpse an ocean, a desert or a blurred and distant view of the Alps. But this morning she frowned and drew her nightgown tight against her throat. The sunlight shrank away through the chink in the curtains. Something had changed. Something was wrong.
The sphere looked bruised, the opalescent bubble had filled with curious worms of shadow. Mrs Clancy stared into the unfamiliar twilight and there, floating in the very centre of the crystal, as small as a maggot in an apple, something dark and something twisted stared at her with scarlet eyes.
She drew back in alarm. It must be a trick of the light, a speck of dust or something spun from her imagination. She blinked and wiped her face in her hands. Slowly, fearfully, she peeped again into the gloom of the crystal ball. Her scalp prickled with horror. The maggot had grown, swollen into a porridge of ugly, wriggling demons. Their faces were human but their bodies resembled toads. They clambered, one upon the other, biting and scratching as they searched for a crack in the magic sphere. She watched them, hypnotized with horror, as they called out to be released, their jaws open and their eyes burning. And as she watched she felt herself drawn down and sucked into their swirling dance. She felt herself shrinking as she drifted down to join them. Her trembling fingers reached out to touch the globe and in her trance it seemed as if it might be no more than a bubble of water waiting to be pricked by her fingernails. But when at last her hand touched, the crystal cleared and the demons vanished in a cloud of milk.
She cried out in surprise and pulled away her hand. Shivers scampered beneath her nightgown. Had she been dreaming? Had she gone mad? She stroked her throat and glanced about the room, searching for other, unseen, horrors concealed in the curtains or woodwork. Her fingers felt frosted and she shivered again. But nothing in the room had been disturbed. A little clock chattered serenely among the bookshelves. The dragons continued to dance on the curtains. Beyond the window there were voices calling, a man coughed and a woman laughed. She had been dreaming.
When her courage returned she lifted the scrying crystal from its pedestal, weighted it suspiciously in her hand and held it up to her face. The beryl shone between her fingers, opalescent and unblemished. There were no ravens, toads or demons. There was nothing but a faint wrinkle of darkness floating in the depth of the fog. She pressed her face closer against the crystal, trying to make sense of the shadow. And there suddenly stood Beelzebub, naked and grinning, his arms thrown out and his penis stiff as a bayonet; Beelzebub, prince of the fallen Seraphim, calling Mrs Clancy to enter the crystal and kneel before him.
She screamed. She dropped the crystal ball. It hit the pedestal with a bang and rolled smoothly into the centre of the table. She kicked back her chair and struggled to escape. But the chair fell over in surprise, spearing her nightdress with one of its legs so that she screamed again and beat her thighs with her fist. As she tried to untangle herself a thin vapour began to spiral from the sphere and the room glowed with a strange and terrible miasma. She pressed herself against the wall, sobbing and hiding her face in her hands. When she dared to look between her fingers she saw Beelzebub squatting naked on the dining table. His skin was wet, his eyes were scarlet and he held a human skull in one hand. He thrust the skull at Mrs Clancy and grinned. When she covered her face from the sight of it he clasped his slender, shining penis and used it like a drumstick to beat a tattoo upon the skull.
A moment later Mrs Clancy fell in a faint on the floor.
Chapter Four
The moon hung, fat and full, over Rams Horn. It grew so ripe that it seemed to sink beneath its own weight, burned through the clouds and floated in the trembling sea. The deserts shone, the peaks of its mountains glittered, the craters were turned into brilliant lakes of light.
The sea shrank from the esplanade, Whelk Pier stood bleached as bones, marooned in a shallow waste of water, its hairy legs alive with crabs. Mrs Clancy cancelled her magic circle and locked the crystal ball away. Tom Crow sat out on the cliffs and waited for the stars to sing their song. Vernie and Smudger lay awake in their beds and stared at the moon as it sailed past their windows.
Sickly had told them that the full moon had a narcotic effect upon those hypnotized during its influence and the assault upon his mother had been planned for the following day. They couldn’t eat and they wouldn’t speak, their eyes rolled vacantly in their heads. They were driven half-mad with excitement.
Smudger lay in his bed and tried to imagine the beautiful somnambulist taking off her clothes at his word of command. But since he had never seen a naked woman he could not give wings to his flight of fancy. He concentrated and gathered together the full force of his erotic experience.
He had once seen the top of Polly’s breasts. Polly was Mrs Reynolds’ daughter, a sixteen-year-old savage with wild hair and wicked eyes. They had been digging for tidal worms in the puddles beneath the pier. Polly, grinning with horror, had been rooting out worms with her bare hands while he squatted on the sand, watching her work, with the bucket held between his knees. She had been wearing a thin summer dress and, if you watched and were patient, sometimes the sun would shine through it and reveal the shape of her legs which made him shiver and rippled the water in his bucket.
He remembered the wind whipping at his
hair and the sand in his shoes. He remembered an old man walking past with a cod’s head in his arms, dogs barking on the esplanade and the mocking seagulls. He had turned away for a moment and then, without warning, Polly was bending over the bucket, counting worms, and the front of her dress yawned open in his face. His heart began to creak with excitement. He had stared, yes, he had stared into the twilight where her breasts nested and seen the pale and mysterious bulge of them before she had pressed the dress shut with her hand. And then he had blushed and frowned and pretended not to have seen them. But he also closed his eyes to help burn the sight of them into his brain.
Yes. And there was more. He had seen the little beards of hair in Mrs Lapwing’s armpits. He had poked his head through the hedge and watched her in the garden, hanging out washing. When it was hot she wore a pinafore so that when she stretched to reach the clothes line you could catch a glimpse of her armpits and in those soft, white purses she had curls of black hair. It was wonderful. Frank’s brother had told them that you could tell everything from a woman’s armpit. He said it was a sign of a hairy snapper. Yes. And he had seen Brenda Butler standing at her bedroom window wearing nothing but a shirt although it might have been her brother because it was dark and, anyway, you couldn’t see much in the rain. And finally, while squatting under her table, he had memorized Sickly’s mother from the ankles to the knees.
He lay in bed and tried to assemble a naked woman from the available fragments, but he could not fit the puzzle together. He turned his thoughts reluctantly to the dangerous art of hypnotism. What would happen if they couldn’t bring Sickly’s mother out of the trance? What would happen if something went wrong and they were discovered? He’d heard that they put you in prison if they caught you looking at nude women. He wrapped himself in his blanket and tried to sleep.
A few streets away Vernie Stringer lay in the dark and considered the enormous implications of their experiment. He knew about women. He had found a magazine called Throb in his father’s wardrobe. It was frightening. He tried to imagine Sickly’s mother in a variety of stimulating positions. He was going to get a good look at her and have a proper sniff around and everything. He might even cut a curl from her snapper and put it in a matchbox. They mustn’t waste the opportunity. Jesus. It might never happen again. The complete stark naked surrender of Sickly’s beautiful mother. Tomorrow he was going to uncover the secret that all the women in Rams Horn had contrived to conceal from him.
It was almost dawn before the conspirators fell asleep. The sea rolled home, embraced the pier and threw itself ashore, flecks of foam, toothpaste white, gleaming on the hissing shingle. Its breath was sour as vinegar. The waves were crowned with garlands of seaweed. The gulls gathered to shriek at Tom Crow climbing down from the cliffs with his milky, moonlit eyes.
Smudger went out to collect Vernie in the afternoon. Mrs Stringer answered the door and scowled suspiciously at the little visitor. Vernie was in the kitchen having trouble with his laces.
‘Where are you going?’ she demanded.
‘Exploring,’ said Smudger. He blushed and scratched his ears.
‘Keep from mischief,’ she warned, inspecting him from head to foot, and he blushed again. He thought women might have some special power that warned them of danger. When they sat on the beach, no matter how he contrived to look up their skirts, they always seemed to sense him and wrapped their arms protectively around their knees. Whenever he sat in the hedge to watch Mrs Lapwing hang out her washing she would always stop and look in his direction and, although he knew he was invisible in the darkness of the laurel, he would take fright and cover his face in his hands. They could sense danger to their person. They knew when you were looking at them.
Vernie appeared at last wearing a brand new pair of plimsolls and trying to hide a paper bag beneath his shirt. His mother gave him a friendly slap across the head. He gasped and tumbled into the street.
‘Behave yourselves!’ she shouted.
‘What have you got in the bag?’ said Smudger when they were clear of the house.
‘Equipment,’ whispered Vernie, glancing over his shoulder.
‘I didn’t bring anything,’ said Smudger in alarm. He had not thought they would require special equipment. What did they need for the occasion? Ropes? Knives? Rubber boots? He didn’t want to think about it.
‘I brought enough for everyone,’ said Vernie.
‘What sort of equipment?’ said Smudger, after they had turned into Lantern Street and were within sight of Sickly’s garden.
‘Scissors,’ said Vernie. ‘And a few matchboxes.’ He had an idea that he might be able to sell the relics stolen from Sickly’s mother. A pinch of hair from her snapper would fetch a high price on the black market. He had collected half a dozen matchboxes and was determined to fill all of them with the little magic curls.
They crept into Sickly’s garden. It was a long strip of rough lawn, flanked by flowerbeds. They tiptoed towards the house, following the shelter of the fence. When they passed Old George’s wheelbarrow they were afraid that he would make a noise and raise the alarm. But when he saw them approach he snarled and slunk away through the pansies. It was perfect. They reached their hiding place and crouched in the bushes, waiting for Sickly to open the kitchen door.
‘Do you think he’ll do it?’ whispered Vernie.
‘He promised,’ said Smudger.
‘If he doesn’t, we’ll murder him,’ muttered Vernie grimly.
‘We could knock him out and take him back to the shed,’ Smudger suggested helpfully.
‘And cover him with Bovril,’ added Vernie. ‘And get Old George to eat him.’ He squinted through the bushes and watched the mongrel asleep beneath his wheelbarrow. Old George had a weakness for Bovril.
When Sickly finally appeared he was wearing pyjamas.
‘What’s wrong?’ said Vernie in alarm.
‘I’ve got a cold – I’m supposed to be in bed,’ sniffed Sickly, wiping his nose on his sleeve. He smelt of sweat and Vapour Rub.
‘Can you still do it?’ said Smudger.
‘Yes,’ said Sickly.
‘And she won’t know anything about it?’ said Smudger.
‘No,’ said Sickly.
‘And we can do anything?’ said Vernie, clasping the paper bag beneath his shirt.
‘Yes,’ said Sickly. He led them into the kitchen and closed the door.
It was a small, untidy kitchen. The remains of a chicken filled a bowl on the table. The cupboards smelt of cabbages. There were toast crumbs on the floor.
‘Where is she?’ said Smudger, pulling leaves from his hair.
‘She’s having a bath,’ said Sickly.
‘Are we going to do her in the bath?’ Vernie asked him, horrified and delighted at the prospect.
‘No, she might drown or something,’ said Sickly.
‘Wait until she gets out,’ said Smudger.
‘Yes, she’ll go into her bedroom when she’s finished. I’ll do her in the bedroom,’ explained Sickly.
‘Where shall we hide?’ said Vernie. He saw himself hanging in her wardrobe like a vampire, his arms folded across his chest, waiting for the moment to strike.
‘Wait here so she won’t suspect nothing.’
‘Give us a signal when you’ve done it,’ said Smudger.
‘A whistle,’ said Vernie.
‘Knock on the floor,’ said Smudger.
‘I’ll come and tell you,’ said Sickly.
‘And we can go upstairs?’ said Smudger.
‘Yes.’
‘And have a proper look at her?’ said Vernie.
‘Yes.’
‘Can I have a drink of water?’ said Smudger. His throat felt dry and his head hurt.
‘Yes, but don’t make a noise,’ said Sickly. The midget mesmerist turned and disappeared through the kitchen door. They heard the stairs creak as he crept towards his mother’s bedroom.
Smudger helped himself to a cup of water and went to sit beneath the
kitchen table, nursing the cup in his hands. Vernie squatted behind the washing machine and chewed his fingernails. In a few minutes they were going to explore every secret and forbidden pleasure that, for months, had tormented their dreams. They both felt sick.
‘She’s ready,’ said the hypnotist. He was standing at the kitchen door. His eyes were burning and a ghastly smile spread across his face.
The three boys went upstairs. Sickly gestured towards his mother’s bedroom and Smudger pushed the door open. An intoxicating smell filled their nostrils, a blend of talcum, soap and scented bath water. The room was hot and dark. Heavy lace curtains filtered the sun at the window and spilled brilliant speckles of light across the carpet. Sickly’s mother lay motionless on the bed, her hands curled together on her stomach and a pillow beneath her head. Her red hair was swept back from her face and feathered against her neck. She was wearing a white dressing-gown tied with a sash. Her bare feet pointed towards the door.
Despite the spell that Sickly had cast upon his mother she looked as powerful as a panther and the invaders were too timid to approach the bed. They stood pressed against the wardrobe and stared.
‘Jesus, she looks dead,’ whispered Vernie. Her face looked smooth and ghostly pale. They had never seen her without make-up.
‘No, she’s breathing. She’s in a trance,’ whispered Sickly.
‘She’s nude under her dressing-gown,’ whispered Smudger. He felt so lewd he wanted to scream. His blood fizzed like sherbet behind his eyes. His legs ached.
‘Have a look,’ whispered Vernie.
‘No, you’re bigger than me,’ argued Smudger.
Vernie tiptoed to the bed. He was shivering with fright. He wiped his hands on his shirt, held his breath and took the hem of her dressing-gown between finger and thumb. He tried gently to tease the dressing-gown away from her legs.
‘Can you see anything?’ whispered Smudger.