Blood and Water and Other Tales

by McGrath, Patrick

  Frank and Meg had penetrated the membrane of the cellar. With their feebly glimmering candle they crept forward from post to post toward the center, where they could hear a low murmur of human voices. Toward the source of the murmur the two children crept with stealth and trembling. They extinguished the candle; Meg still carried the dead monkey in its cardboard coffin. They ascended a shallow wooden staircase and squirmed forward along a damp planked platform between big-bellied barrels reeking of tar and ale; reaching the edge of the platform, they gazed down upon the men and women from the public bar, who were seated about a screened lamp, waiting. Barely had the children settled, side by side on their bellies with their chins cupped in their hands, to watch, when the trapdoor in the cellar roof was hauled open and voices were heard from the public bar above. For a moment there was confused bustle in the cellar; and then, with fresh lamps lit, two men descended carrying between them a supine form in silk pajamas.

  “What are they going to do with him?” whispered Frank.

  “I expect Daddy wants his blood.”

  “Oh, crikey!” breathed the boy, and in his mind a series of images rapidly unfolded of opened sarcophagi and ghoulish creatures neither dead nor alive. In fact, the explanation for the events in the cellar was quite straightforward, in scientific terms. Clutch was right: these people suffered from pernicious anemia, a disease which, if untreated, produces a chemical imbalance in the organism that can manifest in a craving for fresh blood. It has this in common with malaria, that in both diseases there is disintegration of the red blood cells, though malaria for some reason has never produced a sense of group identity among its victims. This is not true of pernicious anemia. The Blue Bat was in fact both haven and refuge to a small cell of untreated anemics, and had been for five years, ever since Kevin Pander had watched his wife sicken and die of the disease. This trauma had brought about what is clinically termed an iatrophobic reaction in the young innkeeper, a pathological dread of doctors, with the result that when he detected the first symptoms in himself he did not seek treatment, but instead began to gather about him a cadre of anemics who, like him, were prepared to live and die beyond the pale of contemporary medical practice; beyond, indeed, the law. For five years these committed anemics had maintained a sporadic supply of fresh blood in the cellar, and there they were to be found, outside normal licensing hours, sipping the good red corpuscles their own bodies so desperately lacked. The Blue Bat’s clientele being what it was, almost all of this blood came from members of the upper classes. The fall of the Roman Empire has been attributed in part to malarial epidemics, and also to the effects of pernicious anemia caused by lead in the plumbing. Whether these facts played any part in Pander’s elaborate delusional system is not known; the psychopathology of that disturbed young man is fortunately beyond the scope of this narrative.

  And so the limp Ronald Dexter was stripped of his pajamas, and then—after his pale, naked body had aroused a spontaneous gasp of appreciation from the assembled company—his ankles were lashed together with a length of stout twine, and the twine slipped into an iron ring attached to a rope which ran to a pulley block fixed to a hook set into a thick beam overhead. Several of the men then took up the rope hanging from the pulley block, and with no small effort managed by a series of heaves to hoist Dexter aloft, and there he hung, quite comatose, and twisting gently, as Kevin Pander lashed the end of the rope to a pair of thick nails driven into an upright post for that purpose. A trellis table was then positioned beneath the dangling man, and upon the table was set a wooden keg bound with hoops of steel.

  All this work had produced a greatly intensified respiration among the anemics, and even those who had not participated were panting in short, hoarse, shallow gasps, such was the excitement that now crackled almost palpably in the depths of the body of the inn. To young Frank, on his platform, the whole nightmarish scene had assumed a distinct patina of unreality; as the bulky figures moved about in the lamplight, their shadows against the stacked barrels and massy beams took on huge, monstrous proportions, and he watched like a spectator of cinema, suspended in the darkness in wordless captivation. He was barely conscious of the mounting excitement in the girl beside him as she followed her father’s activity. Then Kevin Pander suddenly seized Ronald by the hair and sliced open his throat; and as the young man’s blood came pumping out, young Meg trembled all over and rose onto her knees and gazed with wide, shining eyes, her palms pressed together at her breast as if in prayer. Kevin Pander released Ronald’s hair and stepped back, lifting high the dripping razor then bringing it to his lips while two of the other men took hold of the violently convulsing body so as not to lose a drop, and the rest looked on with little piggy eyes that gleamed in the lamplight, the only sound now the hiss and pant of their flaccid lungs.

  At length Ronald ceased twitching, and the spurts dwindled to a thick drip, faintly audible amid the wheezing. The keg was tapped, and now, his gestures inflected with theatricality, Kevin Pander drew off a small amount of the contents into a glass and, to a subdued murmur of approval, held it up before him. In the obscurity the blood was black. He tossed it down his throat; then, his heavy eyelids sliding over his eyes until he resembled a latter-day satyr, lacking only hoofs and horns, and his blood-smeared lips parting in a voluptuary’s grin, he said something that produced a perceptible twitch of ardor in the assembly’s collective body. And where, you may wonder—though now, of course, it was too late for him to be of any assistance to his master—was Clutch all this time?

  A cell without a nucleus is a ruin, and when Congo Bill stumbled into an abandoned pygmy camp there was nobody there to greet him but a ghost; and the ghost in the ruin was Virginia. She smiled shyly at him from the entrance to one of the huts, then disappeared into its dark interior. He managed to drag himself in after her, and collapsed in the cool gloom onto the floor. Illness, according to the pygmies, passes through the following stages: first one is hot, then feverish, then ill, then dead, then absolutely dead, and finally, dead forever. When a small hunting group came through late the following day they found Congo Bill dead. He was not, however, dead forever, nor even absolutely dead, and they set about nursing him with medicines derived from plants growing wild in the forest. At this time, the 1930s, these people enjoyed an existence which to most Westerners would seem utopian. Utterly at peace with the forest that sustained and sheltered them, they lived without chiefs and had no need of a belief in evil spirits. The state of nature was, for them, a state of grace—a functioning anarchy within a benign and generous environment. Not surprisingly, they sang constant songs of praise to the forest that provided for them with such abundance. They were singing these songs when, having seen Bill through his crisis, they carried him into the Station de Chasse on a litter, and handed him over to the resident Belgian colonial.

  Had he known what was occurring in the depths of the Blue Bat, Congo Bill would doubtless have wished to return to the paradise he had briefly known among the people of the forest. By this stage Ronald Dexter was no more than a desiccated envelope of flesh, an empty thing—bule, as the pygmies would have said; but the anemics were by no means satisfied. When, some time later, Virginia was awakened by the sounds of heavy breathing, she opened her eyes to find herself surrounded by large pale women whose eyes glittered at her with an unnatural brilliance. Without further ado she was dragged screaming from her bed; Congo Bill, deeply sedated and ignorant of her plight, slept on in the next room, reliving the happiness and innocent plenty he had known among the pygmies. Help was in fact on its way, thanks to Clutch; the only question was, would it get there in time?

  Yes, Clutch had known the anemics for what they were after only a few minutes in the public bar. He was an old man, and he had seen many strange things in his long life. He doubted he would have been listened to if he’d raised the alarm earlier; so he had hiked off toward Reading, where somebody at the Royal Berkshire Hospital, he felt sure, would take his story seriously. By a stroke of good fortune t
he physician on duty was a man called Gland who’d once read a paper on iatrophobia and sanguinivorous dementia (bloodlust) in pernicious anemia, and within minutes a small fleet of ambulances was racing through the moonlit countryside, klaxons wailing, toward the Blue Bat. But even as they did so, Virginia, in a filmy summer nightgown, was being hustled across the public bar toward the yawning trapdoor, where, in the darkness below, Kevin Pander awaited her with horrible relish.

  It was when he saw his mother being manhandled down the cellar steps that the bubble of suspended disbelief in which young Frank had witnessed the atrocity perpetrated on Ronald Dexter was finally punctured. His whole body stiffened; he turned to Meg, and she immediately gripped him hard by the wrists. “Don’t make a sound,” she hissed, “or they’ll drink your blood too.”

  “That’s my mother,” he hissed back. “I must help her.”

  “You can’t.”

  “I must!”

  “They’ll cut your throat!”

  “I don’t care—”

  Then suddenly Frank broke off, his gaze burning on the shoe box. Meg’s eyes followed his; in stupefied amazement they saw the lid move. Then it was still. Then it moved again, and this time it rose slowly, then slid off, onto the planks, and the dead monkey in its white lace gown sat up stiffly and turned its little head toward them. The two children were barely conscious of the scuffling, of the muffled screams, that issued from the cellar beyond, where the anemics were leering at Virginia and making vulgar remarks. She was not a person in their eyes, merely a blood vessel, a blood bank, to be plundered and consumed like all her kind. The monkey (which was dead but not, clearly, dead forever) rubbed its eyes with tiny paws, and with a small sob Meg seized it up and clutched it to her chest.

  Frank saw his chance; he was on his feet and down the stairs, and running at the assembled anemics. “You leave my mother alone!” he screamed. “You take your hands off her!” Kevin Pander, chuckling hoarsely, seized the child, then passed him to another man, who held him still and smothered his mouth with a fat white hand. There was jocular murmuring among the anemics about this, all conducted in a rich, slurry Berkshire dialect, while Kevin Pander began stropping his razor on a stout strip of leather nailed to a post. Virginia had also been muzzled by her captors; her limbs jerked and her eyes blazed with desperation as she struggled in vain to get close to her son.

  Then the trellis was being hauled over and a number of men took hold of the two Clack-Hermans to steady them over the keg when their bodies began the series of involuntary spasms that predictably ensue when the carotid arteries are sliced. Close by, Ronald turned slowly on his hook. Kevin Pander touched the razor’s edge to his tongue. Apparently satisfied, he stepped forward. He was not smiling now. It was a tense moment, for it very much looked as though Clutch had failed, that he was going to be too late.

  Congo Bill was in pretty bad shape when they brought him out of the forest, and it was generally agreed that a few more hours would have seen the end of him. He had the pygmies to thank, then, for saving his life. Fortified with quinine, he was shipped down the Congo to Leopoldville (as it was then called), where he rested up for some weeks before going on to the coast to board a liner for home. It was in Leopoldville that he bought the monkey. His prognosis was somewhat gloomy—periodic relapses were predicted, accompanied by general enfeeblement and, because of the large number of red blood cells destroyed in the successive paroxysms of fever, a chronic anemic condition. In fact, he could look forward to the life of a semi-invalid, and how Virginia would adapt to that was a cause of some anxiety to him as he crossed the Atlantic—though, as matters stand at this point, the question may well have been academic. He was also filled with deep regret that he would never again do anthropological fieldwork, never again set foot in the equatorial rain forest. Curious irony, he reflected, that the forest in which he had known his deepest tranquility was the same forest in which he had contracted the disease that drove him out forever.

  An hour later Dr. George Gland stood in the public bar of the Blue Bat with a small man in a gray raincoat. This was a detective from the Berkshire County Constabulary, a man called Limp, and he was smoking a pipe. The trapdoor was up on its chains, and policemen and forensic experts moved silently and purposefully up and down the cellar stairs. The anemics had already been led away to waiting ambulances, bound, first, for the Royal Berkshire Hospital, where they would begin a course of painful injections of liver extract, which was how the disease was treated in 1934. The two men were watching Clutch, who sat at a table nearby with his great brown head in his hands, mourning the death of his master, whose drained corpse lay on the floor beneath a white sheet. Sad to say, Ronald was not the only corpse on the flagstone floor of the public bar; beside him lay Virginia, also sheeted, and beside her lay the pathetic remains of little Frank. Clutch had, in fact, come too late, and the three white sheets bore silent and tragic testimony to his failure. Suddenly Limp removed the pipe from his mouth and, turning to the doctor, pointed it at him, wet stem forward. “He had a girl!” he exclaimed.

  “Who?”

  “Pander,” said Limp. “Pander had a little girl—a cripple—she wore one of those boots.”

  “An orthopedic boot?” said Gland. “A girl in an orthopedic boot?”

  Upstairs, a uniformed policeman was knocking on Congo Bill’s locked bedroom door. Slowly the anthropologist was roused from his dream, which was almost over anyway. “Who is it?” he cried, irritably, in a hoarse whisper.

  “Police. Open the door please, Dr. Clack-Herman.” Congo Bill sat up in bed, his withered, yellowing face pouched and wrinkled with annoyance and sickness and sleep. “What do you want?” he mumbled. “Open the door please, Doctor,” came the voice. “Wait.” Slowly he eased himself out of bed, sitting a moment on the edge of the mattress to get his breath. What on earth would the police want, in the middle of the night? He reached for his stick, and slipped his feet into a pair of slippers. His dressing gown lay tossed on a chair beneath the window. He levered himself up off the bed and shuffled across the room. Picking up his dressing gown, he glanced through the curtains. The moon had gone down, and it was the hour before the dawn, that strange, haunted hour between the blackness of the night and the first pale flush of sunrise, and the sky had turned an eerie electric blue. His eye was caught by a movement in the fields, and he saw that it was a girl, a young girl, far out among the glowing cornstalks and limping away from the inn toward a copse of trees that bristled blackly against the blue light on the brow of a distant low hill. Tiny as she was in the distance, he could make out, on her shoulder, the little black-and-white Colobus monkey. He frowned, as he tied the cord of his dressing gown. Why was she taking Frank’s monkey to the trees?

  “Doctor.”

  “I’m coming,” whispered Congo Bill, turning toward the door, faintly disturbed; “I’m awake now.”

  The Skewer

  September 21, 1985. I am an elderly gentleman of nervous disposition and independent means, and I live alone in a rambling Victorian house of which little needs to be said save that it stands close to Hampstead Heath and is colonized by a dense growth of English ivy. This house was built by my great-grandfather. It was completed in the summer of 1856, but he, poor man, never lived to sleep beneath its high-gabled roofs; for in a bizarre accident in the summer of that year he was kicked to death by his own horse. Mrs. Digweed comes in thrice a week to do for me, and I keep a dog, a senile chow called Khrushchev.

  Thus begins the final volume of my uncle’s journal, found on his desk shortly after his tragic death earlier this month. You will not yet have read about the case, but as it will no doubt be sensationalized by the gutter press I will present the facts here. My uncle was Neville Pilkington, the distinguished art critic; he wrote the definitive critical study of Horta de Velde. He was found, hanged, in his study, and it was I who cut him down. Let me say this at the outset: I do not concur with the findings of the coroner’s inquest. I repudiate Dr. Max Nordau’
s testimony, with its scurrilous implications regarding my uncle’s mental state. I suggest to you that this was no simple case of hereditary suicidal tendency; rather, that Max Nordau is guilty of gross professional misconduct, that he subjected my uncle to sustained verbal harassment, and that the effects of this harassment were so pernicious that my uncle was finally hounded, hectored, and driven to the grave! Moreover—but enough. Enough of this vulgar stridency. My outrage must not alienate your sympathy.

  My uncle was a refined man, and a solitary aesthete; and on those rare occasions when he attended art-world functions he always cut a most singular figure. Dressed with impeccable restraint, always in dark glasses, slim and slight, his silver hair flowing over his shoulders, he hovered at the edge of society like a ghost. He had suffered serious burns as a young man, and the skin of his face and hands was all scar tissue. Perhaps this explains his reclusiveness. Perhaps, too, it explains why his mind took a mystical, not to say gothic, turn in the twilight of his life. Like Yeats, he came to believe in fairies; and his mysticism is, I think, evident in the journal entry which follows:

  September 22. This afternoon a most extraordinary thing. Khrushchev and I out on the heath as is our wont, making our way down the path by the stream. The light was fading fast and the breeze soughing softly in the elms overhead. Darkness had not yet fully descended, but the trees and the water had begun to coalesce such that the separation of substance and absence was blurred and indistinct. It is precisely this atmosphere of tenebrous deliquescence which sounds within me the thanatoptic chord, I think because to a deteriorating psyche like my own the approach of night signals the imminence of its own impending darkness. At any rate, we were approaching the plank bridge when Khrushchev stiffened and began to growl.