‘Who dat, sir?’
I hesitated, then told him: ‘Borkum—the fellow who worked here in the doctor’s time. I’m off. Can’t wait to explain anything more.’
The wind and rain struck me like a vast cold living quilt. I had to brace myself to advance against it. I took the track that led round the house to the driveway.
I cut across country, but almost regretted it, for the gullies were raging pools across which I had to battle my way. A network of little rivers fed these pools, and in one place I nearly sank to my waist. I climbed up over a hump of land and saw the road glistening in the rain. I broke into a trot, and as I went round a bend I saw people ahead of me. The landslide must have attracted them. Drenched like myself, they plodded their way through the slashing drops. The road was slippery and treacherous and more than once I barely saved myself from coming a cropper, especially as I was now going downhill.
Rounding another bend, I saw a crowd standing about in a gully to my right—that is, to the east of the road. I paused, wondering whether I had missed my way, for the scene was confused. A huge mass of boulders and earth lay piled up on the eastern side of the depression, and the roof of a small cottage protruded greyly—a corrugated iron roof that glistened in the welter of pelting moisture. One or two men were digging with shovels, and I could hear the sobs and whimpering of women.
Suddenly I realised that the cemetery was just ahead—beyond the next bend in the road. I hurried on, and had no sooner got round the bend—it was the sharp, awkward bend—when I saw Mrs. Scaife. She was scrambling down the incline into the depression where the cemetery was situated. At a glance I could see what had happened. The eastern and part of the southern portion of the cemetery had been buried under a fall of land. The giant shoulder that had jutted so ominously above me the evening before when I had stood under the cliff and heard the tapping sounds made by Borkum had collapsed. The western section of the cemetery seemed unaffected, though small clumps of earth and a few boulders lay scattered in the grass between the tombs.
I went sliding and stumbling down the incline after the old lady. She had already reached the doctor’s tomb when I caught up with her. She was blowing hard, her hair limp and wet, straggling down about her neck and shoulders. I caught her by a shoulder and spun her round. I uttered a few obscenities adding: ‘And now come on! This time you aren’t going to get out of it. What have you done with the remains of Miss Linton? I suppose you’ve cut her up as you did Malverne?’
She laughed a whimpering kind of laugh and gasped: ‘You’ve guessed, have you? Yes, I cut her up. Borkum and I. Oh, it was such fun! ’
‘You beast! You beast!’ I slapped her face hard, and she staggered off a few paces. She collided with her husband’s tomb which was quite intact, and then she raised her face and looked past me. Her eyes widened. She cowered back, and I turned my head to follow her gaze.
There was a humming and a clattering crunch of earth, a shriek, harsh and metallic. I leapt away wildly, landed face down in the wet grass, felt mud and water and the salty taste of blood in my mouth, heard a crashing, yelling pandemonium almost on top of me. A hot pain knifed through my left arm, and then there was a clatter and swish, and long black lines seemed to darken the sky as I rolled over and glanced up. I shrank back, rolled over again in a panic, burying my face in the grass, felt myself flattened down under an abrupt weight, felt the breath being knocked out of me. A dull pain moved in my chest and spiralled round to my back and down to my legs.
I lay quiescent for a moment, hearing confused voices above me. I tried to rise, and found myself emerging from a pile of sugar-canes. People were running along the road above. Two men were scrambling down the incline. Not six feet from where I stood lay an overturned lorry hissing in the rain, a brownish wisp of vapour rising from among the differentials and the confused mass of sugar-canes that seemed to surround me on every side. I felt weak and dazed. The rain beat down on me with unabated spitefulness. I tried to stagger away towards the incline. A mist began to shift before my gaze, first red, then brown—then black. Through this blackness I was conscious of myself collapsing amid a shifty mass of rubble which I seemed to realise dimly had once been the doctor’s tomb.
23
Later, I discovered that it was Jackman who had identified me. She had been among the crowd digging around the buried cottage. Fortunately none of my bones were broken. It was late afternoon when I came to on the bed in my room at Eltonsbrody, and Nurse Graham and Doctor Dayton were the first persons I became aware of. They were standing near the window in conversation. It was from them that I learnt that Mrs. Scaife was dead. The lorry-driver, too, had been killed, and another man who had been in the vehicle suffered serious injuries.
The doctor wanted to take me back to Bridgetown that evening, but, somehow, I felt that it would have been letting down the servants to clear out like that and leave everything in confusion. I had grown very attached to them within the few days of my stay in the house. And, apart from this, I wanted to satisfy my curiosity concerning several little matters.
I didn’t regret this decision. After the doctor and the nurse had left (the doctor promised to make arrangements with the undertakers concerning Mrs. Scaife’s corpse and to inform her son, Mitchell, and, of course, the police) Tappin and I made a careful tour of the house.
In the doctor’s room we discovered traces of earth on the floor near the bed, but there were no bones on the bed as I had anticipated. To our great surprise, we found that the wardrobe had crashed forward and lay at an acute angle over what seemed to be a trunk. Stooping, I played about the beam of my torch to see whether it would be possible to edge out the trunk from under the huge monster of mahogany.
A black warted face, tongue protruding, eyes bulging rigidly, met my gaze.
It was not until the following day that we attempted to have the wardrobe shifted. It must have crashed down upon Borkum as he had been bending over the open trunk (the old-fashioned travelling trunk from the adjoining room). Two front leg-rests, one in the centre and a corner one, were rotten and in a crumbled state. No doubt all the unusual activity in the room after such a long period during which no one had entered it, must have caused a slight shift in the position of the wardrobe, and one of the circling draughts shot into the room during the rainstorm must have tipped it over too far in its perpetual swaying. Borkum had been pinned down, his neck caught between the front of the wardrobe and the edge of the trunk. In the trunk we discovered the doctor’s bones, the ribs and legs and arms clothed in a moth-eaten, dusty evening suit, stiff-fronted shirt blotched and yellow, and black bow-tie.
On the washstand in the next room we found a sealed envelope with the name Tappin written on it in beautiful copperplate. Inside it there was a sheet of paper on which there was more beautiful copperplate. I made a copy of it so can quote it word for word here:
Tappin—I can’t leave this house to you servants because the law won’t let me. It’s entailed and must go to Mr. Mitchell. But all I have, my money in the bank and my other possessions, I leave to you four servants. This is only a little friendly note to you, Tappin. My will properly drawn up is downstairs in the green mug on the sideboard. In it I have allotted to each of you what you must have, and I’m sure I have tried to be as fair as anyone can be. One favour I must ask you, Tappin. Please take care of my husband’s tomb. Have it painted over every six months as is my custom, and see that no weeds are allowed to grow around it. But please never have it broken open for any reason whatsoever. That tomb must never be defiled. I want it to remain intact and as a monument to a Man—a man who loved me and was kind to me, who was tolerant of my strangeness in whatever seemingly terrible and disgusting form it took. So please take good care of that tomb for me. And, Tappin, try like my dear husband not to think too ill of your old Miss Dahlia whatever happens and whatever you may hear of her that is ugly. Some of us poor mortals, you know, were meant from birth to go through this life ‘leaning all awry’.
Well, there you have it all. Not a pretty tale. And as for the central figure in it, I can only leave it to you to decide what sort of person she was. Up to this moment I haven’t yet made up my mind about her. I somehow simply can’t bring myself to dismiss her out of hand as a homicidal maniac. If you’d been in my place and been able to hear her chuckle, and watch her mild, benevolent face break into a twinkling, mischievous smile you’d more readily understand what I mean. Could it really be that she had been born with some macabre trait peculiar only to her? It sounds absurd, I know, yet . . . Anyway, what I know is that many times when I think back on her I find a sort of sadness moving inside me. Perhaps she was right. Perhaps there’s something dark in me myself that makes me able to feel sympathy for her in spite of her horrible deeds. The only times when my sympathy gives way to a cold, bitter fury are those moments when I picture myself standing in the north-eastern section of the little cemetery watching the rough wooden coffin with Nurse Linton’s chopped up remains being taken out from the old family vault. In these moments I feel nothing but hate and loathing for the old lady.
Sometimes I forget her entirely and only the house stands out in my memory. There are quite a few nights when I wake up and hear a ghostly drone of wind outside, persistent, monotonous, whooping and whining—and the creaking of a wardrobe. Even as I sit here writing this I can swear that into the corner of my eye the pale green spectre of an epergne is sidling, elegant and elusive, nodding at me in a sort of dim mockery. And a draught is tickling its way up my trousers legs. A sideboard is taking shape, and that sinister-looking lump of brain coral is forcing me to turn my head to look at it. It’s going to be a long time before I succeed in shaking off the atmosphere of that place. The very name Eltonsbrody seems like a ragged, sticky piece of cobweb that will cling for all time round the nerve-cells of my brain.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Edgar Mittelholzer (1909-1965) is often considered to be the first novelist from the West Indies to earn an international reputation for his fiction, as well as the first professional novelist to emerge from the English-speaking Caribbean. Beginning with his first book, Creole Chips, which he self-published in 1937, Mittelholzer would go on to publish more than twenty volumes of fiction, as well as two volumes of nonfiction, including the autobiography A Swarthy Boy (1963). His best-known works include A Morning at the Office (1950), which one critic cited as having begun ‘the great decade of the West Indian novel’, the Kaywana trilogy (1952-58), and the ghost story My Bones and My Flute (1955).
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