The Scarecrow

  Even in sleep, however, the newcomer provided diversion. At intervals a shuddering groan escaped him. His legs twitched convulsively. It was obvious he was in the grip of a nightmare. Lynette who was a kind-hearted child felt that maybe she should awaken him. She knew what nightmares were like and was always glad when her father or mother woke her up. It seemed an awful cheek to wake up a perfect stranger, but a particularly harrowing groan convinced her that her duty was obvious. She arose and approached the ragged bundle of clothes and bones which heaved and sighed so unhappily.

  At close range he looked more like a zombie than ever. His nose was enormous, like a beak. It was a nose roughly pitted all over and blue in colour. It says much for Lynette that she felt more sorry for its owner than nauseated. It also says much for her that she finally plucked up enough courage to reach out with the intention of shaking him by the shoulder.

  With a bubbling cry the sleeper’s mouth opened wide, revealing that he was entirely toothless and giving him the appearance, especially with the great curving nose above the mouth, of a dying eagle. The claw-like hands began to clutch at the air about him, as if to strangle the ghosts besetting his slumber. There was something horrible about those writhing fingers. Terrified, Lynette shrank back along the carriage.

  Abruptly he awoke. His eyes jerked to where Lynette stood watching him, her hand pressed against her mouth.

  ‘Hello,’ Lynette finally managed to quaver. She tried to smile.

  He began to wipe the sweat from his face with the sleeve of his coat.

  ‘You’ve had a nawful nightmare,’ Lynette decided to persevere.

  The stranger dropped his arms across his knees and the lump in his throat above the bow tie flew up and down.

  ‘At our house,’ said Lynette, ‘we always wake people up when we know they’re having a nawful nightmare. It’s having things like cheese for supper that give ‘em to you, y’know. Have you been eating cheese?’

  ‘And how did you know I’ve been having a nightmare mer love? Bin gabblin’ away in mer sleep, I have no doubt.’

  The gummy cavern from which the hoarse voice emerged fascinated and repelled Lynette, but she felt pleased to have struck up a conversation at last even with an apparition such as this.

  ‘No, but you sure have been moaning and groaning away to yourself something awful.’

  ‘Well then, it’s time I took mer medersin. Mer doctor would be angry if he found I wasn’t being a good boy and taking mer medersin at the recommended, appropriated intervals.’

  Lynette’s laugh tinkled along the carriage. The man opened his cardboard box and produced a squat bottle.

  ‘Don’t you want a spoon?’ Lynette asked, greatly concerned as the bottle was tilted at the patient’s mouth. ‘My, but you’re running a risk, not measuring it out.’

  ‘Long experience mer love—long experience. Man gets to know just what’s the right dose, mer love.’

  ‘You must have a good doctor,’ observed Lynette, seating herself within a few feet of her strange companion, but on the opposite seat. ‘You look as if you’re feeling better right away.’

  ‘I am, mer love.’

  Lynette watched the deep lines around the mouth in the gaunt face deepen into gullies. It occurred to her that he was smiling at her.

  ‘Why do you wear that funny tie?’ she asked; but at that moment the train jerked into motion and it was a line of inquiry she neglected to pursue. Twenty or so wagons ahead of the solitary passenger-coach with its three occupants, the engine bellowed angrily. The long train creaked and shuddered. Soon the bracken and fern-clad walls of the long cutting just out of Te Rotiha dwindled to barbed-wire fences. Across rolling farmland, with its homesteads and haystacks and shelter belts of pine and macrocarpa the train, ironically referred to as the 4.30, lumbered coastward. The countryside was already becoming gloomy.

  Searching her mind for some conversational gambit to keep her intriguing fellow traveller from falling asleep again (his chin was slumped down on his chest) Lynette hit upon an idea. Steadying herself against the edge of the long seat, she made her way down the length of carriage to the corner where her aunt slept. From her aunt’s knitting basket she abstracted a rolled-up copy of a city newspaper’s morning edition. She had amused herself earlier on, by reading the headlines upside down and back to front, but her aunt had refused to hand her the paper.

  ‘It’s horrible, Lynette,’ she had said. ‘It’s not fit to be read by little girls who’ve been sick. Read your comics, dear, and think of the nice holiday by the sea we’re going to have. The last time you went to Oporenho you weren’t knee high to a grasshopper, and you’ve forgotten what it’s like to have the beach at your back doorstep.’

  Place of honour on the front page of the paper had been allotted to a photograph of a smiling Daphne Moran, Lynette’s own second cousin. Beneath black, arresting headlines summarising the progress made in the search for the slayer, ran the second-day story of the young theatre usherette who had vanished and whose ravished, nude body had been discovered the following day by boys sailing boats on a pond. The body had been semi-submerged in a weed-choked corner of the pond. Daphne Moran’s throat had been cut.

  Despite their relationship, Lynette had hardly known Daphne Moran at all. Her childish mind was scarcely able fully to grasp the stark horror of what had occurred and her excitement at being even remotely associated with such a sensational event far outweighed any feeling of grief. That her relationship to the murdered girl made her a mighty important person was a suspicion that Lynette had had confirmed by the veiled conversation between her aunt and the guard earlier on in the journey. It had been veiled but it had not fooled Lynette one little bit. The guard’s eyes had nearly popped out of his head when he had found out who they were. First the illness which had confined her to the sick-room and now this trip to the seaside had outwitted Lynette’s hopes of cashing-in on her reflected notoriety; but seeing her chance now, she took it.

  The guard saved her the chore of actually re-awakening the tall, scarecrow-like man in the corner. When the door of the carriage opened to admit the guard, the sudden cyclone of black smoke and cold air and roar of the wheels which entered along with him awakened even her aunt.

  Lynette had known for some time that the guard had been standing on the platform of their carriage. She had been just able to discern his shape through the soot-grimed glass panels of the door. She had carefully opened up her newspaper and then folded it again, so that she could thrust the picture of Daphne Moran under the man’s very eyes. Now she dropped the paper on the seat beside him and stumbled back to her aunt’s end of the coach.

  ‘Sit down, Lynette,’ said her aunt. ‘Heavens, girl, don’t run all over the place the moment I doze off.’

  The guard lit one of the dome-shaped oil lamps in the roof and then stood over the huddled figure of the strange man who fumbled for money to purchase his ticket. Then he descended swayingly on Lynette and her aunt, pausing on the way to open the glass and ignite the wicks of two more lamps.

  ‘Next stop, Klynham,’ he informed them. ‘You’ll be into Oporenho in time for tea.’

  The guard, having punched their tickets, returned to his van immediately aft of the passenger coach. The door slammed on the racket of the wheels. Miles ahead, it seemed, the engine hooted.

  Now Lynette’s mouth fell open in astonishment. At the other end of the carriage the man who suffered from nightmares was on his feet, arms above his head as if in abject terror. He was grey-faced, gibbering. He shrank back against the door.

  ‘Aunty, aunty,’ said Lynette, urgently. ‘Look, look!’

  ‘What is it?’ said her aunt. ‘This must be Klynham.’

  Lynette looked out and saw the scattered lights of a town in the gathering dusk. When she looked along the carriage again there was only the folded newspaper on the seat to be seen. The cardboard box had dematerialised and so had her favourite zombie. For a man who looked so old and ill he must have whirled about a
nd ducked away at incredible speed. Either that or the encounter had been all a dream. Lynette opened her mouth to address her aunt but sighed and closed it again. She had a feeling it would be just a waste of breath to tell her aunt about the zombie man.

  The train gradually creaked to a standstill. Things banged and a voice shouted. Lynette rubbed a hole in the mist on the closest window and pressed her snub nose against the cold glass. She thought she glimpsed a shadow, like that of a huge bird, stumbling across the tracks into the gloom.

  When Pop and I had jumped down from the guard’s van at Klynham and sneaked back along the line a little way as we knew Jim Coleman wanted us to do, Pop said, ‘I’ll go over and see Connie for awhile. Yuh just tell yuh mother I’ll be back home shortly and if yuh take my advice yuh’ll steer clear of elaborating on our disastrous journey as if ever there was a woman to make a mountain out of a molehill and vicky verky it’s yuh good mother, bless her heart.’

  And so I found myself following the sinister scarecrow man up the dusky streets. It makes my flesh creep to remember.

  Chapter Four

  Although there had been no steady rain, no downpour, for over a week, there was a big puddle of water in the middle of Klynham’s main street. It was always there, even in the heart of summer. It was a feature of the town. It had nothing to do with rain, but owed its existence to subterranean forces, seepage, impermeable strata and so on. The puddle was right outside the Federal Hotel and had been the looking-glass of many dissolute visages, many coyly lopsided moons. One night when the wide street was empty and the moon shepherded a few dark clouds from well aloft the puddle gave to an evil face a setting of jewels and muddy mountains. The face was owned by a phenomenally tall man and the devil himself could not have conspired with a street lamp to cast a longer shadow. It was also the face of a phenomenally thirsty man. A tongue flicked parched lips, eyes sought in vain for a chink of light, some flaw in the armour of the Federal Hotel. He began to cross the road. The puddle, automatically skirted, faithfully recorded his stealthy, purposeful passing.

  Ever since, earlier that night, he had jumped down from the coast-bound train, Hubert Salter, for such was the tall man’s name, had been skulking in a back street, concealing himself in the shadows of Hardley & Manning’s rear entrance. No one had gone past. He had crouched back against the door when he had seen a group of figures gather on the corner, but it was only the Salvation Army band, who almost immediately began to serenade the deserted streets. To the sound of hymns and, in the intervals, the preacher’s upbraiding and vehement voice, Salter finished off his squat bottle of schnapps. The alcohol dispersed his fears. He began to feel certain that he had been in panic-stricken flight from nothing more tangible than his over-wrought imagination. He cursed his folly. He was glad he had slipped away from the city, given such a golden chance, although there would have been little danger in remaining; but to end up in a little township like this, in the still of a Sunday evening was dangerously conspicuous. At Oporenho, small as it was, there would have been the port and the big freezing-works with its army of seasonal workers to absorb him. Even in the remote event of being questioned Salter could have proved that, always in the past, whenever the current travelling show he had been with had folded, he had headed for a port and freezing-works town to seek casual employment.

  ‘The wolf bane is blooming again,’ Salter muttered. The highlight of his life over the last few days suddenly flashed back to numb his brain. Ecstasy flooded his loins and his genitals.

  ‘And say unto you, I am Jesus,’ came the preacher’s voice. The drum began to thump and the band struck up again.

  ‘Yes, and I am Death,’ proclaimed Salter dramatically, peering crazily up from his hiding place at the moon which was drifting at a cock-eyed angle over the Jubilee Hotel. He began to mutter crazily to himself, and hammered against his temples with his fists. Crouching down he sought through his cardboard box for the butt of a cigarette. The box contained a strange assortment: coloured handkerchiefs, billiard balls, a black velvet bag, a length of silken cord, a wand and so on. There was even a pair of handcuffs. The half-smoked cigarette was in an unusual type of tumbler that featured a mirror partition. When Salter lit the cigarette the acrid smell of hashish filled his nostrils. Eagerly and deeply he inhaled, holding the smoke in his lungs for as long at a time as he was able.

  Raising his head he saw out of the corner of an eye the reflection of his great beak of a nose in the glass doorway of the shop. A cry escaped him. The reflection went back and back along the tunnel of the years. The sequinned pink tights and big beautiful legs of Zita, his assistant in the great mind-reading act, loomed up in the reflection. One of her hands rested on the arm of a wavy-headed young man and her pretty face was twisted in a sneer. They did not know that Salter, in the mirror, had seen them sneering at him, sneering at Salter the Sensational. For a long time he had roamed the benighted amusement park and then he had seen her shadow against the lamplight in her tent, as she wriggled her plump, soft buttocks to discard what little she did wear. Exultantly the crimson haze had befogged his brain. That night fire had raged through the camp and destroyed for ever her ravished, sneering body. So easy it had been. So almost unbelievably exciting. Such mad exhilaration, such sexual power the mad, evil moment granted. So easy it must always be.

  The reefer was scorching Salter’s lips. The Salvation Army band was packing up. Salter chuckled. Coming from the dark doorway, the chuckle had a devilish sound.

  As soon as Alf Yerbey, the licensee of the Federal Hotel, heard the rap on the back door he switched off the light in the little back bar. The only illumination now came from the passage, through a transom. Alf Yerbey’s main reason for switching off the light was to impress on his customers the importance of keeping silent. He knew the futility of trying to shush men who had been drinking beer for some hours; but he knew, by switching off the light, he could temporarily shut up even the most garrulous and intoxicated of his Sunday night customers.

  In the dim light the men slid coins and cigarettes off the bar and returned them to their pockets. They began to shuffle into an adjoining room, a storeroom that had bottles of beer and wine in crates and cartons stacked half-way up three of its walls. Only a stranger, or the police, would have rapped on the back door in such a way. Anybody who was in the know would have scratched on the door three times with a coin.

  In the gloom the publican lifted the flap in the bar and stepped through it. Besides himself, the only person who had not evacuated the bar was Charlie Dabney, the undertaker, who was perched up on a stool peering owlishly around.

  ‘Great Scott,’ mumbled Charlie Dabney. ‘The jondomorohso. The minions of the law, what, what. Ignorant pack of bastards. No respect for gracious living. Place cordoned off. Innocent citizens—’

  ‘Ssssh, sssh,’ said Alf Yerbey.

  ‘Victimised,’ concluded the plump little undertaker, clamping the corner of his mouth tightly on an unlit cigar which waggled uncertainly. He nodded solemnly and then looked up abruptly. ‘Nicely put?’

  ‘Very nicely put, Charlie,’ said Alf Yerbey, who had no intention of offending his most regular customer and biggest spender by far.

  ‘Why can’t they go catch a burglar or something?’ Charlie demanded to be told. ‘People getting murdered right left ’n’ centre. Hotbed crime. Gutters running red with gore. Assassins looking every friggin’ doorway. Wharah police do? Cordon off friggin’ pub. Storm last bastion of gracious living. Nicely put?’

  ‘Certainly Charlie,’ said Alf Yerbey.

  ‘Wheresh Athol?’ said Charlie Dabney. ‘Need moral support in this, our darkest hour.’

  Hearing the mention of his name, Athol Cudby peered out of the storeroom.

  ‘You’re all right, Claude,’ said the publican. ‘Charlie’s booked into room twenty-three as usual and you can be his guest. Keep your money out of sight while I see who the hell it is. Let me do the talking.’

  When he said ‘room twenty-three�
�� he spoke louder and looked hard at Charlie Dabney, who was never able to remember his room number when he was questioned by the police. Although Charlie Dabney’s place of business, which also served him for a home, was just across the alley from the hotel, the police had finally recognised that they would never convict him for after-hour drinking, unless they caught him in the White Hart or Commercial. He had a permanent room (which he never occupied) and sat down to quite a number of meals (without eating anything) at the Federal. Charlie Dabney was a well known oddity in the town. Some called him ‘old Nicely Put’ others ‘old Episode Closed’. Everyone agreed he was a ‘dag’, a ‘real dag’. He had been mixed up in some extraordinary and side-splitting incidents. The last of the Dabneys, he appeared to have almost completely ruined the business and yet still have a supply of folding money as limitless as the twinkle in his eye. Everyone liked him, except for a few wives who had waited all night in vain for the return of their spouses, but he was a man to be avoided like the plague, unless one had a few days to spare. To be lured into his shop for a convivial spot was disastrous. The place was stocked with enough food and booze (all hidden in the queerest places) to withstand a siege.