Iris struggled hard with the temptation. Ought she to try to revive the old fascination? Once, Desmond had suffered bitterly through her action. His face seemed quite tranquil now. True, there were lines round mouth and eyes, but Iris was unskilled in reading emotions, and placed them as a tribute to time. If the old game of the Candle and the Moth were to be revived, would the end this time be the total extinction of the Moth?
The woman wavered, and then the love of admiration proved too strong, and the fierce flame of Vanity licked up the last scruples in a glow of desire. Iris had always met a lover’s advances halfway, and if he showed no desire to even approach the line of demarcation, then she sallied forth alone, to reveal to him his destination. And she longed for Desmond’s other wing. So, with a soulful look in her blue eyes, she leaned forward – her pretty, white chin nestling among her dark furs, calling to Desmond – calling, calling.
And he heard. Seven years of disuse had not blunted her old powers. Desmond slowly, reluctantly, fell under the spell, and, in the old way, he turned his head, and looked at her.
The calm blue eyes looked at her quietly. Then, a sudden chill seized Iris, as, to her amazement, she saw the red lamp of murder kindle in them. She watched the light grow and blaze, as though fed by a Devil’s torch, and then Desmond rose from his seat, and came towards her – his head thrust forward, his lower lip hanging, and his whole body bent, and moving with a curious undulating slope.
She gripped her seat in alarm, and then the groundlessness of her fears reassured her. The policeman’s warm cape caressed her, and the red calico faces of the roses looked at her cheerfully. The City man turned the leaves of his paper with a brisk rustle. This was no isolated spot, where murder stalks unchallenged. The absolute safety of her position filled her with a sense of comfort.
Desmond came yet closer; she could see his fingers quivering and wrapping themselves round each other, with an undefined sense of coming horror. She watched them with fascination, as they twisted and curled, but even as she looked, they shot out, and she felt her throat held in a bony grip.
One minute of shock, and then the terror died away before the comforting assurance that help was at hand. The policeman coughed noisily, and a man behind broke out into a whistle. The fingers pressed tighter.
A slight singing began in Iris’s ears, yet to her amazement nothing happened. She cast her eyes desperately round the car, and saw, to her bewilderment, that no one had stirred. It was as though everyone was quite unconscious of what had befallen. Iris reeled before this stunning fact. She could not grasp its significance. A wave of utter incredulity swamped her whole being. Even while the murderous fingers were tightening each minute, even while the man was swaying above her, in the force of his convulsive fury, the everyday world read calmly on, while a tragedy was being enacted.
Indignation ran hot through her veins. Then it was met by a returning current of so icy a horror, that she collapsed into a powerless heap.
Still in his seat, two yards away, was Desmond – looking dreamily into space, his eyes absolutely unconscious. She took in every detail of his form and costume; she noted that his tie was grey crêpe de Chine, and that he wore violets in his buttonhole. And yet, standing over her, glowering with inhuman ferocity, was the other Desmond.
Iris looked, and something caught her strained sight. It was something bright, that glittered and swayed in circles and hoops – something as fine as spun glass, and as dazzling as silver – something like a silken cord. She saw with a thrill that this thread united the two Desmonds.
A jumbled mass of psychological facts heaped themselves up in the woman’s brain. Articles she had read on astral bodies, sub-consciousness, second personalities, all blended together, but the one terrible truth seemed to stand out clearly. The injured personality, the spiritual part of Desmond, that she had wounded so mortally, had suddenly remembered its slumbering wrongs, and had slipped out of its corporeal envelope, to avenge its violated individuality. And stinging her brain like a hornet was the thought that she alone had called forth this Minister of Vengeance.
Broad iron bands seemed now to fasten round Iris’s head, as the grip pressed more closely. She could feel the blood foaming like a mill-stream through her veins, seeking to find an outlet, and driven back by the encircling hoops.
The pity of her position filled her with anguish. She felt that she was in the thrall of some monstrous nightmare. She struggled to cry out, and tell the people on the car of her danger. The scream ‘Murder!’ rose to her blue lips, but the cruel hands pressed it back, and sent it down to echo in the depths of her hopeless heart – ‘Murder!’ With the strong arms near – with the kind faces round her – ‘Murder!’ And to Iris the horror and pity culminated in the knowledge that Desmond sat and dreamed on, all unconscious of the price that was being paid as Blood Penalty for slaughtered Truth and Faith. His sensitive mouth was set in a smile. His whole being was a mute protest against violence of word or act.
Now the lights began to dance around her, till they joined with the street-lamps in a cluster of golden bulbs. Faster they went, round and round, till a circle was formed, and lamp melted into lamp in a fiery ring. Round and round it spun. Then it suddenly swooped up into the air, while Iris felt herself sinking down – down. She saw the ring grow smaller and smaller, till it flickered to a star – dwindled to a pin-prick – and went out.
Iris now became conscious of a strange conflict that was raging within her. She could feel her reeling brain sending down agonised signals to her heart, which sent back an answering ‘thud’. It seemed as if it were holding the fortress against the assaults of Death. The beats grew feebler each minute, like the blows from the picks of entombed miners. The roar of a great sea sounded in Iris’s ears. The signals from the brain, running down the jangled nerves, grew more desperate and despairing, but the answering ‘thud’ was weaker.
Then suddenly something almost imperceptible broke through the roar. It was so faint, so far away, that it seemed like the very last vibration of sound. The sense, rather than the words, fell on Iris’s ears, ‘Lady – seems – ill.’
They were the very last echoes that reached her from the Finite World. The last heart-beat was followed by silence, and she slipped away into the Infinite.
The next minute, the car seemed to break up, like the pieces of a kaleidoscope. Instead of a compact whole of quietly ranked people, forms passed hurriedly to and fro, pushing each other in excited confusion. Only one was unmoved, a man, who remained in his seat, wrapped in dreamy abstraction.
The forms clustered round, and drew closer to the centre. Then they parted, and Something was borne down the steep stairs. The car went on.
But the man on the seat never stirred.
Robert Westall
BEELZEBUB
Robert Westall (1929-1993) was the multi-award-winning author of over forty books for young readers. He is the only author to have won the Carnegie Medal twice, for The Machine Gunners (1975) and The Scarecrows (1981), while Blitzcat (1989) won the Smarties Prize and was named by the American Library Association as one of the best books for young adults in the past 25 years. Westall also wrote extensively in the field of the supernatural and has been called the best writer of traditional British ghost stories since M. R. James. Valancourt has previously published his collection Antique Dust (1989), his only book written specifically for adults, featuring tales centred on an antique dealer’s encounters with the supernatural, as well as his novella The Stones of Muncaster Cathedral (1991), and an original collection, Spectral Shadows, which comprises three short novels of the supernatural. Another original Westall collection focusing on his World War II-themed tales, some of them supernatural, is forthcoming from Valancourt. Following the enthusiastic response to Westall’s ‘The Creatures in the House’ in The Valancourt Book of Horror Stories, Volume 2, we’re pleased to present another of the author’s seldom-seen tales, a story the manages the difficult feat of being both chilling and extremely f
unny.
The Register Office stands like a red-brick Gibraltar amidst the wild ways of Polborough. Five granite steps lead up to doors of solid oak.
It needs those doors. Polborough has always been wild. The inhabitants have that feckless energy and ingenuity that invariably leads to disaster. They do not have the restraining influence of a cathedral, like their western neighbour, Peterborough. They have done too well, too quickly, out of a network of Thatcherite light industry.
Their latest money-making scheme is night-clubs, famed across the Midlands, which disgorge maddened hordes of the drunken young from as far away as Birmingham on to the streets at 2 a.m. Massive streetlights are a growth industry, while the Polborough police huddle together in their fives and tens and hope that real murder is not taking place. Every year the town’s fifty-foot Christmas tree is snapped in half by some drunk trying to climb it. Rape is endemic.
Of course, the Register Office suffers. Every Monday morning its windowsills are lined with crushed lager cans, and polystyrene containers full of curry and rainwater. Unmentionable graffiti sprout like mushrooms. The deep shadowy back porch is littered with the debris of sexual passion.
All this is removed by the caretaker before the public can see it. Under the eagle eye of Mrs Parsons, the senior registrar of births, deaths and marriages. (She is convinced she is senior registrar; she is the oldest, has been there the longest.)
The Register Office is lucky to have Mrs Parsons, as she is the first to point out. The superintendent is a Mr Brooks, a worried-looking man nearing forty, who has young children at home who always seem to be ailing, and a wife who rings him several times a day to report their symptoms. He does his job, but anyone can see his mind isn’t really on it. Mrs Parsons’s enduring memory is of him standing with his hand on her door-handle, dark hair dishevelled, spectacles awry and military raincoat unbuttoned, saying:
‘I must get home on time tonight, Mrs Parsons. Will you see to things?’
Mrs Parsons had the time and energy to see to everything, having reached that comfortable stage of life when her children were off her hands, and her husband cowed domestically to a mere fetcher-and-carrier. A woman of solid muscular frame, she swam thirty lengths of the baths every Saturday afternoon, and played badminton regularly. Her cheeks were rosy; her red hair, cut sensibly short, seemed to bristle with energy and she found time not only to be churchwarden (senior churchwarden) of her parish church, but also organist and head of the Sunday School. She held the theory that most people’s troubles were of their own making, and could soon be sorted out by a person with sense.
She ran the Register Office as she ran her parish church. Even in this time of cutbacks, the parquet floor shone like glass. She did fresh flower arrangements twice a week. The smell of wax polish and flowers amounted to an odour of sanctity. The wedding room was freshly painted and curtained to Mrs Parsons’s taste. And if her fellow registrars grumbled that their own ceilings were peeling and their chairs uncomfortable, Mrs Parsons told them that in times of financial stringency, sacrifices had to be made.
She had installed a receptionist of so dire an aspect as to cow even such wild inhabitants of Polborough as dared to marry or breed or lose their loved ones. Outrageous requests to use the toilet (reserved for staff only) or the telephone (to contact the undertakers) were crushed instantly.
Of course, even Mrs Parsons could not entirely stem that frenzied flood of desire and delusion that was Polborough. She could not stop forty-year-old divorcees, seven months’ pregnant, from getting married in long white wedding-dresses, attended by children of a previous union playing bridesmaid in shocking-pink mini-skirts. She could not stop bridegrooms turning up in ragged jeans and trainers. Or two trampoline champions getting married in their England tracksuits. She could not even stop the proud and pugilistic father of twins registering them as Sugar Ray and Frankie Bruno Rafferty. Or the man who wished to register his son as Thomas H. Lacey.
‘What does the “H” stand for?’
‘Nothing. Just “H”.’
‘You can’t call somebody just “H”.’
‘What about Harry H. Corbett then?’
The worst day had been when a prisoner on remand in the local jail came in to get married, accompanied by two warders. Afterwards, of course, the family demanded to have wedding photographs taken on the five steps of the Register Office, just like everybody else. And of course you couldn’t expect a man to be photographed in handcuffs on his own wedding day . . . and would the warders, who had been so very kind, like to be in the photograph? In the back row?
No sooner had the large group posed than a car drew up at the kerb. The family closed ranks as tight as a rugby scrum, and the bridegroom was into the car and off before the warders could struggle clear. Only the bride, screeching in marital frustration, had offered any pursuit . . .
Of course, Mrs Parsons was not directly involved. Had she been in charge it would never have happened. But it was she whom the gutter press rang up afterwards, avid for a sensation. She told them coldly that they could purchase copies of the marriage entry, like any other member of the public, and with that, in spite of all their bribes and pleadings, they had to be content.
The frost of Mrs Parsons’s disapproval of this incident had not really melted when, one unusually warm afternoon at the end of October, the woman with the baby turned up. Mrs Parsons was not at her best on warm afternoons when there was little business. Her vigorous lifestyle finally caught up with her, and she tended to fall asleep at her desk, which reminded her unpleasantly of her age and her mortality. She would start awake suddenly, with a sense of the world gone awry, and some opportunity missed. It was the nearest she ever got to a sense of guilt.
Mrs Parsons, called to the waiting room by the receptionist’s buzzer, summed up the woman at a glance. Dusty black dress, down-at-heel black court-shoes, no tights. And Mrs Parsons could smell the woman, even through the familiar reassuring odour of wax polish and flowers. An earthy smoky smell that followed Mrs Parsons’s clicking protesting heels up the polished parquet; that settled comfortably in Mrs Parsons’s spotless client’s armchair.
The woman had the chaotic voluptuousness of an overgrown cottage garden. Long luxuriant black hair, greasy and held back by an elastic band. Large shapely breasts that must never have known a bra. A broad band of filthy lace petticoat that showed as she crossed her curvaceous but overheavy white legs. A strappy handbag over her shoulder that was no more than a bulging home-made sack of leather. A face full of lovely curves that was somehow both sly and not quite all there.
But it was the baby that really caught Mrs Parsons’s attention. The woman was holding it with its face turned away from Mrs Parsons. It looked all of six weeks old and very well grown, but definitely . . . slightly . . . coloured. The odd thing was that Mrs Parsons got the impression it was slightly coloured green.
Must be a trick of the light, Mrs Parsons thought. The curtains she had selected for her own personal office were a deep tasteful restful green, and the sun was shining on them pretty strongly, and green light was being gently reflected on to the ceiling. But if the light made the child look green, why did it not make the mother look green as well? Mrs Parsons shook herself free of such distressing fancies, blaming the warmth of the afternoon. Took a firm grip on herself and launched into that registrar’s litany of questions that she knew even better by heart than her church’s Matins or Evensong.
‘Have you come to register a birth?’
‘O’ course!’ The woman looked at her child, affronted, as if to make sure it was still there.
‘No, no,’ said Mrs Parsons hastily. ‘But I have to make sure you haven’t come in to register a death, haven’t I? I mean . . . someone might come in with their child to register someone else’s death, mightn’t they?’
The woman looked at Mrs Parsons, as if she thought Mrs Parsons might be slightly mad. Then she said, in a thick Fenland accent:
‘’Tis birth for this one
, though it might be death for some.’
Mrs Parsons had a strong and furious impulse to ask her what the devil she meant; and then an equally strong impulse to draw back from venturing into such a quagmire. The woman’s accent was so strong, she might have misheard her. Or it might be some weird old Fenland saying. Stick to the business in hand! At least she now knew she was registering a birth. She drew the relevant draft form towards her and poised her regulation black Biro.
‘Are you the baby’s mother?’
‘O’ course!’ Again the woman seemed deeply affronted. She gripped her child with a fierce possessiveness. Again, Mrs Parsons felt the need to explain.
‘We have to ask, you see. It’s our rules. You might have been some other relative . . .’ Then she thought wearily, oh, why bother? She’d never felt the need to justify herself before. What was the matter with her this afternoon? The heat? Or that earthy smoky smell that filled the room and seemed to stir long-forgotten memories from her girlhood, when her world was far less hygienic and well organised than it was now.
‘What date was the baby born?’
‘Six weeks come Friday.’
What a peculiar way of putting it! Didn’t they have calendars where she came from? But, on second glance, probably not. There were tiny bits of dried grass clinging to the woman’s bare instep, and what looked like a smudge of cow-dung. Mrs Parsons consulted her own calendar and said briskly, ‘That would be the twenty-third of September then?’
‘If ’ee say so,’ said the woman. ‘I’d a ruther it had been All Hallows’ Eve, but beggars can’t be choosers.’ She said it resentfully, as if she’d been cheated.
Why All Hallows, for heaven’s sake? Again, Mrs Parsons nearly asked the woman, and then drew back. Get involved in that swamp, you might never get out. Best stick to the road you know.
The Valancourt Book of Horror Stories Page 20