Familiar and Haunting

by Philippa Pearce

  Where are you going,

  And what do you see?

  The long line of children wavered about the playground until the two ends of it came together and joined. Suddenly there was one irregularly shaped ring of children, with Mr. Bryce and Mr. Dickins in the middle of it.

  The children still ran, and as they ran, they pulled outward—outward—to form a proper circle round the two men. When they had achieved this, more or less, they stopped running and changed to dancing on the spot, still chanting as they danced:

  Bully B, Bully B,

  Where are you going,

  And what do you see?

  And the air in the playground seemed to tighten, so that there was hardly room to breathe, and we, the witnesses—the vicar, Mr. Hartley, Mrs. Salt, and myself—stood stock-still and staring–

  Bully B, Bully B,

  Where are you going,

  And what—

  —and there was a sound such as I hope never to hear again on earth—a deafening crack!—and at the same time an upward burst of flaming light against which—instantaneously—my eyes closed. But against the inside of my eyelids was printed the image of Mr. Dickins and Mr. Bryce, entwined, and they seemed to be all on fire, inside my eyelids, and I heard a howl that was more than any human being could make, and yet it was human, and I knew that it had been made by Mr. Bryce.

  I put my hands up to my shut eyes, as though I had been blinded, and I fell to my knees.

  When I opened my eyes again, the playground was in confusion. The children were no longer holding hands, or dancing, or chanting; they ran aimlessly, or stood, or sat, some sobbing or weeping, others laughing hysterically. Mrs. Salt was trying to control them and get them back to their classrooms. The vicar was leaning against the wall of the churchyard, as though he had been flattened there by the blast of an explosion. Mr. Hartley was lying on the ground beside me, half out of his senses for the time being.

  The middle of the playground was empty: no Mr. Bryce, no Mr. Dickins. Where they had stood, there was a huge bubbled scar in the asphalt, like two lips that had opened widely once—perhaps to swallow some tasty morsel—and then closed again in a dreadful sneer.

  That’s really all. Mr. Bryce and Mr. Dickins were never seen again. Nobody knew where they’d gone. Mrs. Salt said they couldn’t just have vanished, as we seemed to think; that was against common sense and reason. She was sure they’d slipped away, under our very noses and escaped to an enemy power, for whom they had been spying in this country.

  “An enemy power …” Mr. Widdington said thoughtfully.

  We had trouble with the education people. They had never answered Mr. Widdington’s letter because they hadn’t been able to trace Mr. Dickins in their records. Certainly, they had never sent us a Mr. Dickins as a supply teacher. They denounced Mr. Dickins as an impostor.

  When they heard of the mysterious disappearance of two of our staff—well, one, because, of course, they wouldn’t count Mr. Dickins—they went so far as to send an official in person to make inquiries. He found out no more than I’ve already told you, but just before he was leaving, he noticed the damage in the playground. He said to me, “What the hell’s been going on here?”

  I didn’t answer him. I didn’t think that kind of language was suitable for an education person, in a primary school playground; I wouldn’t have liked Susie to hear him.

  The Road It Went By

  He looked down into a deep, dark, oblong hole, my mother and I. Aunt Cass, who stood beside us, said, “He wanted to be buried in the weedy part of the cemetery. That’s what he said. The weedy part … “’

  “It’s weedy all right, Aunt Cass,” said my mother.

  The gravedigger’s spade had shorn through a tangle of greenery into the earth and then through the tangle of roots there. All kinds of roots, from the hairlike roots of grass to the rank, yellow roots that must be nettle, but, among all the others and more than any other, wriggled pale roots that looked like unpicked white knitting wool. I recognized ground elder. Then the spade had dug deeper still until it reached the barrenness and darkness of the subsoil of my uncle Percy’s grave.

  “Yes,” said Aunt Cass, and sighed and turned away, and we followed. The funeral was not until the next day; my mother could not attend, and I would not. I had not even wanted to come down with her to see Aunt Cass. But now, suddenly, I felt sorry about Uncle Percy; I had known him so well when I was a small boy, and I remembered the times when he had been kind to me, and gentle.

  I had often been sent to stay with my aunt and uncle; they were really my great-aunt and great-uncle, and elderly. They had never had children of their own, and in their quiet, slow way, they welcomed me. For myself, I was happy to go to them and to be in a place that was still nearly the country, with big gardens round about where my uncle Percy worked in his retirement.

  Uncle Percy now did jobbing gardening, and he often took me with him on his jobs.

  Mainly, my uncle Percy dug, and of course, he weeded as he dug. By far the worst weed in the gardens we visited was ground elder. (Dog elder, my uncle called it.) And the worst place for ground elder was Mrs. Hartington’s herbaceous border.

  Mrs. Hartington was rather grand. On no account was her jobbing gardener to come up the front drive to reach the garden, which lay at the back of the house. Instead, he must come by the lane that ran along the bottom of the garden and use the door in the fence there. Mrs. Hartington always unlocked the door just before my uncle’s arrival.

  So Uncle Percy and I entered Mrs. Hartington’s garden by the door in the fence at the bottom, went past the rubbish heap and the vegetable patch, and so arrived at the lawn and that overgrown border.

  Mrs. Hartington popped out of the house at once to give her orders to her jobbing gardener: “Percy, I want you to get on with the digging of the border.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Hartington, ma’am.”

  “And you’re always forgetting to light that bonfire. Don’t forget again.”

  “No, Mrs. Hartington, ma’am.”

  She went back indoors.

  My uncle Percy began to dig and weed, while I unpacked from my Mickey Mouse suitcase my spacemen and spacewomen and space vehicles and various rubbery monsters. Then I started to build their headquarters and habitations out of stones and twigs and mud. Sometimes I had tried to tell my uncle of the amazing exploits being carried out so close to his feet. Mostly he did not hear me—he was deaf—but if his hearing aid was working, he still paid little attention to what he dismissed mildly as my “rambling on.” The truth is, my uncle had no fancy, no imagination. He was incapable of believing in anything he could not see or hear or touch or smell or of inventing such a thing. I have always been quite convinced of that.

  Besides, later, I had my own experience.

  My uncle dug steadily on, weeding as he dug. This was all that was ever expected of him; this was the limit of his gardening skill. He was not clever with plants; really, he was not clever at all, or enterprising. At home, they had only a small back garden that had been entirely paved over for many years. Aunt Cass grew tomatoes in great pots, but Uncle Percy went there only in summer to take his Sunday nap in a deck chair. He was not exactly a lazy man, but he was slow.

  He was also, as I have said, gentle in his speech and in all his ways.

  This afternoon I was prattling to him as he dug. Suddenly he said, “Hush!” and ceased work to bend almost tenderly over the mess of earth and root and stems that he was handling. (This was not the first time he had behaved oddly in Mrs. Hartington’s garden. Before now I had wondered what my uncle was hearing or hoped to hear, when he screwed his hearing aid so firmly into his ear as he weeded. Young as I was, I had decided that he was not really preparing to listen to me or to the birds or perhaps to any ordinary thing in the garden.)

  And this was the moment when Mrs. Hartington chose to come out onto her garden doorstep with a mug of tea to be fetched by her jobbing gardener. (Nothing for me, ever.)

 
“Percy!” she called.

  He was listening to something else; he did not move his head; he did not move at all.

  “Percy!” she called again, more sharply.

  He ignored her.

  She set off across the lawn with an angry briskness, walked straight through my mud and twig structures, smashing them, and so reached my uncle. “Percy!” she said very loudly. “Your tea!”

  Without lifting his head, my uncle said, “Shut up!”

  Mrs. Hartington was so startled that she slopped the hot tea from the mug onto the earth of the border. This time he rounded on her and shouted, “You silly old hen! You’ll hurt it!”

  My uncle never spoke like that to anyone—let alone to Mrs. Hartington. Never.

  Mrs. Hartington stared at him, dumbstruck with amazement. Only slowly did the words come to her that she judged right.

  Meanwhile, “It?” I said, and peered at the earth of the border where the tea had splashed. There was nothing to be seen but ground elder, rooted or uprooted.

  Mrs. Hartington had begun speaking. “Please,” she said to my uncle—and she sounded the word like a plunging dagger—“please, remember my instructions that a fire should be lit on the rubbish heap at least once a week. You have persistently disobeyed my order in this respect.”

  My uncle Percy did not answer her; he had turned back to his work, and his hearing aid now dangled free. It seemed insolently to sneer at her.

  Mrs. Hartington raised her voice. “Please, obey my orders. Otherwise the few weeds that you have managed to dig out of my border will reinvade my garden.”

  She wheeled round and went back to the house, still carrying the mug, and my uncle resumed his digging and weeding.

  But-it?

  I stared at the earth and then peeped at my uncle, a little fearfully. I did not question him, partly because his hearing aid was still disconnected. In the end I went back to my play. I had to repair the destruction caused by recent interplanetary attack.

  At the end of that afternoon, I walked beside my uncle as he bar-rowed his weed load down to Mrs. Hartington’s rubbish heap. Then I realized the truth of her complaint; he had not lit a fire there for a long time.

  And he was not going to do so now.

  He began to empty his fresh barrow load onto the heap. Instead of tipping it all out in one go, he was moving it piecemeal, handful by slow handful. There was something unusual—lingeringly attentive, even loving—in the way he spread his fingers among the roots of the ground elder.

  I dared to ask him now, “What is it, Uncle Percy?”

  He told me, and I’m sure he told me only because I was just a child; I didn’t count. He said, “There’s the root of that dog elder, and then there’s another thing, like another root, but it’s not a root. That other thing winds and twines round the dog elder root, like ivy climbing a tree. It uses dog elder; dog elder root is the road it goes by. It never comes above the earth. I don’t know where it comes from, or where it’s going, or why, at all. But it sings. No, it doesn’t sing, and it doesn’t speak. Something else, it does. … I can feel it sometimes. …” He moved his fingers gently among the roots. “And sometimes I think I can hear it on my whajamacallit. …”

  And he screwed his hearing aid into his ear and bent his head over his recent weedings.

  “Can I listen on your hearing aid, Uncle?”

  “No.”

  “What’s it like? Is it music then?”

  “No. Not that, either, but it sounds all the time in the earth. …”

  After a while he gave a sharp sigh that made me realize that he had been holding his breath. Then he put his handful onto the rubbish heap, and after that, he did tip all the rest of the barrow load onto the rubbish heap. Then he gathered up some good soil from the ground and spread it protectively over the newly dug roots.

  Then we were ready to go home.

  The next day a brief note arrived from Mrs. Hartington for my uncle Percy. Mrs. Hartington would not be requiring my uncle’s services again in her garden. She would be making other, more satisfactory arrangements. His pay to date was enclosed in the envelope.

  My aunt Cass was indignant on my uncle’s account, but he did not say much. He started at once on an extraordinary task. He began taking up all the paving stones in their back garden. It was a heavy job for an old man, but he worked steadily at it. Aunt Cass fluttered round him, begging him for reasons and explanations. He gave none.

  By the afternoon of the next day, all the paving stones were stacked in one corner of the little garden, exposing an area of bare, sour-looking earth.

  “That won’t grow anything but weeds,” said my aunt Cass.

  “Yes,” said Uncle Percy.

  That evening Uncle Percy went very early to bed. Aunt Cass told me to play quietly, because my uncle was resting. She thought he was resting after his efforts in the back garden; she did not realize that he was resting before further effort.

  What happened next was a shock to everyone.

  In the very early hours of the morning, the police station received an urgent call from Mrs. Hartington. She had heard footsteps on the gravel of her front drive and by the side of the house, and she had glimpsed a figure carrying what she thought was a sack.

  The police came at once and, searching Mrs. Hartington’s garden, found … my uncle Percy! He would give no explanation of his presence there at that hour. His sack was empty, and there was no clue as to what, if anything, he had intended to put into it. There was no sign of his being about to break into Mrs. Hartington’s house, in spite of Mrs. Hartington ’s conviction that that had been “what he was up to.”

  In the end, in the face of my uncle’s gloomy, unbroken silence, the police decided that the old fellow was a bit off his head. Perhaps the shock of Mrs. Hartington ’s abrupt dismissal had been too much for him. Probably he had had no criminal intention that night, perhaps no clear intention at all. He had always been a bit of an odd old fellow, but at least, in all his life, he had never been anything but law-abiding. Everyone agreed on that. No one in the village had a bad word for Old Perce—except, of course, Mrs. Hartington.

  The police managed in the end to persuade Mrs. Hartington to let the matter drop. At the same time, they suggested to Aunt Cass, who was terribly upset, of course, that she have a chat with the doctor about Uncle Percy. They also suggested that in future, she should keep a very sharp watch on him between sunset and sunrise. This she began to do.

  In the daytime my uncle Percy still went jobbing gardening, although, of course, never at Mrs. Hartington’s. At first people looked at him a little wonderingly; Mrs. Hartington had put her story about, no doubt. But nobody liked Mrs. Hartington much or believed her.

  I still went gardening with my uncle, but things were different now. In his slow, silent way, Uncle Percy was unhappy. He dug ground elder from other flower beds and vegetable plots, but—no, it was not the same. One afternoon, as he finished work, he said to me, “You’re off home tomorrow, boy. Did you know that?”

  “Yes, Uncle.”

  “Before that, I’ve something I want you to do.”

  “What, Uncle?”

  “I’ll show you,” he said.

  He took me a roundabout way homeward, going by the lane at the bottom of Mrs. Hartington’s garden. (“She’s out,” he said; I don’t know how he knew that.) He tried the door in the fence, but of course, it was locked. The fence was too high for anyone to climb easily, and barbed wire lay along the top. The slats of the fence were set too close for anyone to squeeze through, even a child. But as we dawdled along the fence, my uncle pulled gently at each slat. All resisted.

  Sometimes there was a passerby in the lane. Whenever anyone appeared, my uncle Percy was just taking a stroll with his great-nephew. At the end of Mrs. Hartington’s fence, my uncle turned me round, and we walked slowly back along it. Again he tested the slats, pulling a little more strongly this time. And this time he found one that was loose—only very slightly loose
—at the bottom. He pulled and shook until the slat was a great deal looser. He brought out a pair of pliers and managed to extract a fastening nail from the bottom of the slat, and another. Now the slat hung only from the top. It looked perfectly in position, like all the other slats, but in fact, it could be swung to one side or the other to make a narrow gap in the fencing, a narrow entrance into Mrs. Hartington’s garden.

  “You’re small enough,” said my uncle. “You could get through there.”

  “But-but-”

  “After dark—it would have to be after dark.” I was appalled.

  “You’ll easily get through there and get it for me,” he said.

  “It?” But I knew what he meant. I began to cry.

  He caught me by the shoulders so roughly that it hurt, and he swung me round to face him, and he bent right down to my level. He stared at me with his blue, blue eyes. He stared and stared. I was too frightened to go on crying. He said, “I must have it.”

  “It?”

  “I must have it, and you must get it for me. Tonight.” He was whispering, but he might as well have been shouting, yelling, screaming, shrieking. I cowered from the sound of his voice. I had no will of my own against his. Only a child as young as I could get through that narrow gap in the fence, yet I knew I was far too young to be made to undertake such a venture, at night, alone. Yet I should have to do it.

  Late that night, on the excuse to my aunt that he was going to the toilet, Uncle Percy came to my room and roused me. My aunt became aware that more was going on than she knew of.

  “What is it?” she called sleepily from their bedroom.

  “Little chap’s wakeful,” my uncle called back. He helped me quickly to dress. Then I took my Mickey Mouse suitcase, empty, as I had been told. As I crept down the stairs, I heard my uncle getting back into bed beside my aunt.

  It wasn’t far to the lane at the bottom of Mrs. Hartington’s garden, and I knew the way, and there was some starlight. But I was terribly frightened, even if I were frightened of nothing. I was a very little boy then, remember. I longed for my mother to be there, or at least for someone safe to meet me and ask, “What’s a little fellow like you doing out all alone in the middle of the night?” But the village street was deserted at such a time.