Stories of the Strange and Sinister (Valancourt 20th Century Classics)

by Frank Baker

  He went all over the house. In the attic he glanced for a moment at the rotten apples and the heap of charred papers in the grate. Picking up one half-burnt sheet, he read a few lines of poetry. It did not interest him. Going downstairs, he took one last look at the shop, then padlocked the door and returned to the solicitor. He left instructions to sell the place, lock, stock and barrel.

  But a buyer could not be found, and nobody ever cared to take the peeling shutters down from the windows, or, as people will, to pry into the premises.

  For the ‘Valse Triste’ is still heard from the piano on the other side of that door where dead leaves, mingling with the tattered leaves of music which have slipped through from the darkened shop, rustle and crackle in the wind.

  V

  The Chocolate Box

  Intense repugnance. That is one definition of horror to be found in the dictionary. Or, power of exciting such feeling.

  I think it is more. It is also what is totally unexpected: the long sunlit lane that has only a brick wall at the end, the worm in the rose, the sudden ravaged image of one’s own tormented face in a window pane. That which has sudden power to corrupt and defile. A stench where sweetness should be; darkness where light should be; a grin where a smile should be; a scream searing into a night where silence should be. An old withered hand where a young hand should be . . .

  And no escape from whatever it may be that has suddenly come upon the visitant. No escape.

  I write those words by way of preface to the story of something that happened to me fifty years ago. And immediately I ask myself whether I want to tell the story, or why I have to tell it. I must. That is all. If only because – but let the reason come later.

  It does not seem possible that it was fifty years ago, and I – a young man living alone in a mine-pitted valley near Land’s End where on nights of no moon the darkness had a surging, living quality in which I could hear not only the waves of the sea but the waves of the music I knew I would write; a young man with great ambitions that have only been sparely fulfilled. With my music – scores of composers then considered avant-garde, such as Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Hindemith – and a few books and a stack of virgin scorepaper, I had rented a cottage in this remote valley, barely furnished, but containing all I needed except one thing – a piano. And the arrival of this, my old black Bord, I awaited from London. Against the advice of parents and friends I had come as far west as I could go, there to come to terms with the music I knew I must compose. Nothing else mattered.

  But this is not a story about music. I must keep it out, otherwise it will flood the pages and consume me. I am writing of a particular night in spring, a night of pitch darkness when I was walking down the valley to my retreat, after an evening in the King’s Arms.

  Let me get it as clearly and simply as I can. Without comment, and no ‘ornaments’ to use a musical term I like. Bleak, as it was. Very bare.

  Half way down the valley, along a path treacherous with jagged stones and lichenous boulders, I drew up sharply. I could not see, but I knew someone was coming up the same path towards me. I stopped. The other person stopped too. A moment of silence, then I could hear his breathing – for I knew somehow it was a man. He came closer, and I drew aside.

  ‘Good-night, Mister.’

  I heard the words, husky and defensive. And almost before I could return his greeting he had passed me, and I could hear his footsteps, getting dimmer, crunching over little stones. I had no idea who he was, nor did it much trouble me, after the first shock. I had had too good an evening at the King’s Arms, I was too full of imagined music – a theme in B minor played in my head, with a recurring B, reminiscent of the ‘raindrop’ Prelude of Chopin – and its supporting harmony, possible weaving of counterpoint, was beginning to form in my mind. So I went on, and in a few moments the stranger had left my mind.

  Perhaps thirty steps on I stopped again. My foot had touched an object in the path, and it was not a stone. Something soft, something I felt should not be there. You must understand that there was nothing in the least frightening about this. I was far too full of music to be frightened of anything. But I stopped none the less, struck a match, and bent down, shielding the flame from the slight breeze blowing from the sea – a western breeze that smelt of rain. Already I could smell the sweetbriar from the steep hillside garden of my cottage. And the B minor theme drifted into the major. (Keep music out – oh, keep music out. It has nothing to do with what I am trying to relate. . . .)

  In the light of the match I saw what seemed and was incongruous in that setting. A chocolate box, a familiar box of those times, one with a picture of King George V on it, and crossed by a red ribbon. A white cardboard box. A pound box. I laughed. It seemed absurd, lying there. It was familiar to me, because these were the chocolates my mother liked best. We had always had them at home, they belonged to my childhood. What was it doing here? I could swear for certain it had not been there earlier in the evening, when I had walked up the valley.

  Obviously, I told myself, it would be empty. And yet I had to pick it up, to be sure, even though I was not in a chocolate-eating frame of mind that night, having drunk many pints of beer (fourpence a pint in those days). So I did pick it up, and realized at once that it was not empty. The match went out, and it was the last in the box. So on I went in the enfolding darkness, holding the box, vaguely wondering if it contained chocolates, and remembering a melody by Dvorak, ‘Songs my Mother taught me’.

  Inside the cottage I found another box of matches, lit the lamp, then the small Beatrice oil-stove, and put a kettle on for tea. The room became warm and welcoming in the glow of the lamp which lit up score paper littered over the table. I longed for the piano. It was a night when I wanted to improvise, to hear those sounds which played in my mind. Yet I was content to wait. The piano would come in the course of the next few days. Putting the chocolate box down on the table, I cut a hunk of bread and found some cheese. The silence of the night was broken only by the trickling stream deep in the valley. And in this sound my B major theme evolved into a new episode.

  I remember that I did not hurry anything. There is a kind of happiness, almost an ecstasy, which can flow into the soul when it is least expected. And this is what filled me then, coupled with the assurance that very soon with my piano I would begin to hear the music I was hearing now only in my mind.

  I made the tea, ate some bread and cheese, lit a cigarette, and then looked again at the chocolate box which still lay on the table. It was damp from the night air, slightly browned. But it was, it seemed to me, friendly – like a message from home which said, ‘Don’t worry, you are on the right path.’ I was reluctant to open it, and even wondered whether I would do so that night.

  But at last – and by now it was well past midnight – I did open it. At once, I drew back a little. I saw something wrapped in tissue paper, something stained a sullen rusty red. And like a flash of lightning the whole scene changed, the whole peaceful contented mood was shattered. Whatever was wrapped in that tissue paper I knew that I did not want to take it out and examine it. Yet I had to do so.

  As I looked down at the object wrapped in the tissue paper a new sound came insistently into my ears. I tried to ignore this sound. I tried to gather back into my mind the music which, only a few minutes earlier, had been moving there, making its own form and order. But it would not return. I only knew the key: B minor. And could only hear this new sound – a humming, a buzzing, which rose to a crescendo, then sank to a diminuendo until it died away completely, leaving only the sound of the stream outside.

  And still I was staring down at the open box.

  I put my hand down to touch the tissue paper, then drew back. The sound had come again, and this time nearer, then broken by a strange blundering little thud, which should have finished it, yet did not. For now the sound was close to my ear. Something brushed my face and I p
ut my hand up involuntarily, slapping my cheek.

  It was a bluebottle. I saw it veer drunkenly above the lamplight, then swoop down in an arc towards the box, then away again.

  I tried to laugh. Bluebottles are loathsome, I have always hated them. But to be almost panic-stricken by one was clearly absurd. And as to what was wrapped in the tissue paper . . .

  I took it out, and drew back a little of the paper. I saw what looked like the nail of a finger – a blackened nail, horny and scored with yellow cracks.

  The bluebottle swooped down. Suddenly I shouted at it, and at the same moment drew away the folds of paper from the object in my hand.

  In my hand . . . There it was. A hand in a hand. A dead hand cradled in a living hand. A left hand, severed at the wrist, hacked away and still bleeding.

  I laid it down, then drew back with a hiss. I felt sick. From a fold in the window curtain, drawn towards the hand like steel to a magnet, the bluebottle loomed across the room. It settled where it wanted to settle. On the dead hand.

  My mouth was open, as though to release something foul inside me. I could do nothing for several seconds but stare down at the hand and the bluebottle stalking across the palm with its broken-up lines and branches. Then I looked away to the bright circle of red light from the little oil cooker – always a comforting glow. It was late April, and the air was clammy and heavy after a day of heavy showers. There was no sound now from the bluebottle. The silence seemed to solidify, I felt as though the bracken-breasted hills each side of the valley were meeting and closing in upon me. There was a faint satisfied humming again, as the insect delved deeper into the palm of the severed hand. I forced myself to look at it.

  It was not a large hand. Wrinkled, with long fingers and black grimy nails, unfreckled, hairless. I put down my own hand as though to touch it, but could not. Still, in a half bemused manner, I could not quite believe it was there – the thing that should not be there.

  I blew on it, which disturbed the bluebottle and sent him crashing crazily round the room, angry, defiant.

  It wasn’t true, I told myself. It could not be true. If I had had a piano here I could have beaten back the rising sickness in me. As it was, I retched, went quickly out to the door, and was sick.

  I stayed, wiping my mouth, looking into the solid darkness. Then I remembered the man who had passed me, muttering ‘Good night, Mister’, and so quickly disappeared. Who was he?

  Getting control of myself, I returned to the cottage, half hoping, yet knowing it could not be, that the hand would not be there.

  It was there. Calmly now, I put the lid back on the box, telling myself I must take it to the police station next morning.

  I went up to bed. Whether it was the amount of beer I had drunk, I do not know. But, mercifully, I slept – for several hours. I awoke suddenly, before dawn – not with any memory of the hand, not out of some nightmare, but struggling to recall music which had drifted back into my sleeping mind. I sat up. If I could get downstairs now, I told myself, and touch the keyboard of a piano, the music would return.

  But there was no piano downstairs. And suddenly I remembered what was there. Then, until the sun rose over the shoulder of the valley, I lay awake, remembering it was a spring morning when I should have been happy.

  It is difficult to keep music out of this story I have to tell, and yet I must try. Try to relate the incongruous events quite simply, as though they had not happened to me, but to someone else; as though it were an account of something I might have read in a newspaper.

  And when I write ‘it is difficult to keep music out,’ I mean simply that music – or the lack of it – played so large a part in the events of the following days, days in which I tried so desperately to recall the themes which had been in my mind before I opened that box. Themes which would not return, and now, perhaps, never will.

  What happened, as I came downstairs the next morning, remembering what had been on the table, lying on top of the score paper, the night before? Nothing happened. I remembered the chocolate box as one remembers a dream, and still held on half desperately to the hope that it had been a dream. But it had not. For there the box was, still on the table where I had left it; and my cup, the sugar basin, plate and knife, ashtray, books, lamp, papers. Everything was exactly as I had left it, including the opened box and what it contained.

  There is a hard, matter-of-fact side to my nature, a ruthless side if you like, which can at times come to the rescue. It did then. Hardly looking at the hand, I put the lid on the box and took it over to the window seat, where I left it. It was quite straightforward, I said. Somebody had chosen to leave a severed hand in a chocolate box. I had had the misfortune to pick it up and bring it home. It must go to the police station. That was all there was to it. No concern of mine.

  But a curious thing happened. As I put the box in the window seat it seemed to me that it had already become part of the place. I suppose I was trying to rationalise the matter. I had found something, brought it home; and here it was. Why should it be any more offensive than, say, a stone from the beach, a spray of blackthorn, or wreckwood washed up in Priest’s Cove – things which, in fact, I had found, and were now in the room? Things which had become part of me, part of my life.

  So, with this box, and its content. Perhaps it had been dropped by the man who had passed me in the night. But I had found it, I had brought it back. ‘Findings keepings,’ I muttered, and found myself laughing – laughing, I now know, to keep fear at bay.

  So I opened the box again, and again with the half thought that I might have only dreamt, or seen in a drunken haze, what had been there last night. But there was no escape from it. The hand was still there.

  Without touching it (this I could not yet bring myself to do) I looked at it closely, quite dispassionately. The bleeding had stopped. A thick coagulation of dried blood had sealed the carpal bones at the wrist. I thought it had changed a little during the night; the colour was different, slightly greenish. Living, what had the hand done? Written letters, caressed lovers, held a spade, slid forefinger and thumb into scissors, struck blows, waved aside the sea as the body swam, picked flowers, played a piano –

  It was then that I put the lid on the box and tried, oh so hard, tried to forget it.

  I make these breaks in the story because as I write, I falter – trying to remember; and because I write with pain and a sense of loss I cannot overcome. And once again I tell myself – I must try to stick to the facts. What happened that day?

  I suppose I made breakfast – coffee, toast, marmalade, and plenty of the rich dark yellow butter which you could buy then in pound slabs from the farm above the valley. I may have read a little from the local paper, for I liked to pretend to myself that I was concerned to some extent with events around me. I wanted to feel that I was a citizen in this unknown western country, that I would be accepted as ‘one of them,’ that a man who had decided to spend his life composing music which perhaps nobody would want to hear had his right place in the world.

  But whatever I did, as I sat in that room, every now and again I would look across to the window seat, half hoping that the box would not be there, and yet – in a most curious way – calmed when I saw that it was. I cannot describe adequately, or understand, this new sense of ownership that was stealing into me. As though I had found treasure and was already hoarding it.

  I remember that I had planned that day to break in a triangle of land up the slope behind the cottage, where I intended to put down some gladiolus bulbs. And I refused to allow the hand to alter my plans, particularly as the sun was now fully risen into a clear sky. It would be absurd to put off what I had intended to do on so lovely a spring day.

  And so I worked on the hillside, well into the late afternoon, only coming in for some bread and cheese about noon. From time to time, as I dug into the rough ground I found myself muttering
‘the Hand, the Hand,’ already giving it the honour of a capital letter. Hand. And I would look at my own hands at the spade, thinking – this isn’t the kind of work these hands are meant to do. I need to use my fingers – at the piano. Then I would dismiss these thoughts, and go on digging, beginning to hate the earth.

  I remember suddenly hearing the call of a cuckoo, very near to me, near enough to startle, and realizing that there is only enchantment in this creature’s falling major third (and later, minor) when he is heard from a distance. But when he is near, then the falling notes are like blows on the ear; and you remember that the bird is like a pirate. Delius would not have written his idyllic piece for orchestra had he heard the cuckoo as I heard him that day.

  By six o’clock, rain had started to fall. Clearly it was blowing up for a souwester. It was always the wind I loved, and I love it still, but that evening, as the sun went down and the valley darkened and the wind began to rush in great gusts from the sea, I did not love it. I had intended walking up to the village in the evening, taking what I had found to the police station, then to the King’s Arms, to drink and try to forget the whole matter –

  Try to forget it! As though that were possible. And it was not the kind of evening in which to take the long trek to the village; for now the rain was driving in slanting sheets, filling the gushing stream in the valley. It was one of those evenings in late spring when winter makes a sudden dramatic reappearance and you long for darkness to come. But darkness is delayed, and the heart grows cold as you look at the empty grate, choked up with old cigarette packets – Player’s, at sixpence for ten. Light a fire, I said. Go out to the shed and bring in some driftwood. But when I opened the door, the force of the wind almost knocked me back. I shut it fiercely, drew the curtain across the doorway to the small living-room, sat down, and clenched my fists, looking at them. There were blisters at the base of the fingers of my right hand. Were there blisters on –